


Never Ending Fairytales

by piratemutt



Category: Euphoria (TV 2019)
Genre: All of this but with daemons !, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Best Friends, F/F, Falling In Love, Growing Up Together, Implied Sexual Content, Mental Health Issues, Ocassionally Non-chronological order, Recreational Drug Use, Romance, Sexual Content, So much teen angst and bad decision making skills, Teen Angst, Time Skips, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, original non-human characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 21:10:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 31,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19731853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piratemutt/pseuds/piratemutt
Summary: ❝ Tell me what am I missing if I wait;and life is quietly whispering: you're too late.I guess I've got a decision to make. ❞At seventeen, Rue Bennett was quite sure that life was just one fucked up, unsatisfactory situation to another; recently out of rehab, soon to start school with everyone that has something to say about her maybe/sorta/kinda dying, that constant nagging need to spiral to stay in control of something, and the icing on this really shitty cake: her unsettled daemon, Reid, and she is wholly determined to not stay clean because of such. Just reverse that order.At seventeen, although Jules Vaughn had never been in a relationship or even, in like, love; she imagined spending the rest of her life with her best friend. They'd live in a shitty New York apartment and maybe date other people, but always sleep in the same bed, and she'd ponder on how she was always one step behind ever actually getting that. Accepting she just... wouldn't. That was fine, she had her daemon, Celeste.That was the summer they both met at a totally lame, really boring, and kind of lackluster house party.And this was the weird shit that happened after.





	1. G.O.A.T

**Author's Note:**

> In the same taste of the show, this work may be triggering to some audiences and as such, I suggest you don't proceed if you're sensitive to such topics as heavy recreational drug use, sexual content, sexual situations involving minors, unhealthy coping mechanisms, unhealthy examples of relationship dynamics, and the frequent step down dark roads. With that, I promise to put my all into depicting every aspect of this curvy story with the utmost respect, care, and realism. 
> 
> Rue and Jules will also be the focal point of this fic as I simply wish to see their interpersonal relationship expanded on a little more, as well as just being utterly terrified about how their relationship will progress in the show and I like to be self-indulgent. With that, too, there'll be canon divergence (obviously, it's an AU), but there wil be frequent uses of me making the best of canon content and seeing as this season isn't over yet ( As I write this on July 9th, 2019 ) and there could be a possible season two. So please take that into consideration when reading!
> 
> I also suggest taking into consideration that unsolicited critique not be given, I feed on positive feedback and much rather hear what people enjoy and totally encourage people to leave their thoughts!
> 
> If you're new to His Dark Materials, then all you need to know about this alternate universe is this: A dæmon /ˈdiːmən/ is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person's 'inner-self' that takes the form of an animal. Dæmons have human intelligence, are capable of human speech—regardless of the form they take—and usually behave as though they are independent of their humans. Pre-pubescent children's dæmons can change form voluntarily, almost instantaneously, to become any creature, real or imaginary. During their adolescence, a person's dæmon undergoes "settling", an event in which that person's dæmon permanently and involuntarily assumes the form of the animal which the person most resembles in character. Dæmons are usually of the opposite sex to their human.

“You know where Tampa is? Florida. If _that_ came from _there,_ who knows what it’ll do to you, Floridians would snort oxy clean if it was marketed right.” Reid said, sat in the sink of this weird flower and antibacterial cream scented bathroom, his paws gripped on the edge and his whiskery face twitching. “You’ve had better ideas.”

Rue, breathing in that cocktailed air, slouched over the sink where her daemon—a terribly bend-able ferret at the moment—watched, beady eyes trekking her arms until a hand slipped into her pocket. “I’ve had worse ideas too,” and that much was true. Objectively, buying the drugs in the first place could be considered the worst. “You need to get on board, like, quick.” Was a drawled sort of warning as she unzipped the tiny bag of powder and pulled up her ring of keys, singling out one to dig up a reasonable amount to sit ever so temptingly on the point. “Let’s go.”

“No, no. No, let’s **_go_**.” He said, waving his hands for emphasis. “Put that down, we’re done.”

His words teetered on the edge of her mind too little too late, with a tilt of her arm, she inhaled the powder from one nostril and cleared her throat with the next breath. Outside, music blared and tried to crawl under the crack in the door, only to be muffled when she repeated the action with twice the dug up white. “Rue…” Reid tried, he did and she felt kinda guilty, the way his body pooled in the porcelain-like he was water from the tap; he never liked getting high, and she couldn’t like anything else. _Like is a strong word and doesn’t apply but explain it as something else… self-medicating and that’d be too clinical to be like, accurate,_ she thought on the third tilt.

Maybe that’s why they were so fucked up together; the girl and her currently ferret daemon. Two right shoes. Yellow paint dunked in white, somehow so contrasting yet containing nothing similar at all, sometimes it was hard to believe he was ever supposed to be some extension of her soul. 

_It’s hard to review what you don’t really feel like you really have half the time, though, right?_ Right. _Glad we’re on the same page._ Right.

Muted. Paused. Like a rewound VHS tape, clicking and skipping every other beat, Rue had found herself slowly stepping out of the bathroom. Eyes dragging right… left, right again as Reid slunk up her arm, ferret-y tail thwacking her ear until he perched on her shoulder. A girl stepped past them, shutting the bathroom door and encouraging Rue’s final steps out with that action. “I don’t like this,” was whispered in her ear as though the bodies occupating the hall had the attention span to eavesdrop. “What’s this?” He asked about nothing in particular, body almost weightless on her as he took the form of a mouse and his pink hands held close to his face. “I didn’t do that.” 

Rue only turned her head, world all topsy turvy so she stuck out an arm to rest on the wall, but the wall slanted right and she tilted with it. Momentarily noting that the music was busting through the tiles of the floor before, and now it was hardly a muffle of a distant echo; and the wall kept slanting, tilting, rotating like a car flipped in a wreck and her hands were the only saving grace as she walked the twisting turn. 

There was a moment between hitting her knees and the hooded ceiling lights standing at her thighs where she watched dandruff fall from one guy’s head, the room was like a really shitty snowglobe, or he was an awful salt shaker. But the dandruff floated back as her palms smacked the cold tiles, toes pushing her back up as the music kicked a beat she lost at the bathroom; Rue breathed, hands dropped at her sides and eyes staring dead forward. 

In a pocket, Reid squeaked, furless tail hanging limply out. Until ringed fur beneath his eyes appeared and said he was already over with this. She wondered if she looked worse, mouth agape and hair thrust back like she’d stuck her head out the window while on the highway. 

Hands working through it, Rue looked around, then down. At the stairs she stood atop, funny. 

“Hey,” peeped Reid as he tumbled from her pocket, single hand holding on until he dropped… but became a scruffy black fox before his tiny body ever hit the ground. “Somebody took the bag, I think you dropped it… you tripped… I think, good riddance. I don’t like it.”

Perhaps she wasn’t always a reliable narrator. 

That was fine because she got that feeling in her stomach like the time she did MDA and thought the neighbor’s birdbath was a viable kiddie pool. And as long as they slunk down these stairs without falling, they did a great job, internal thoughts be damned.

* * *

And damned they were as the pair waded through bodies; daemons of all shapes and sizes pressed tight to their humans or somewhere close enough to not be bored, dogs and cats and birds and the other animal classes in between because she forgot what lizards were for an undeniable second. 

Amidst the neon lights of blues and reds and purples, Rue swallowed up the smoke hazing the colors, and she sort of… blinked. Somewhere between the suffocating noise and sweat and another key tip of powder while she had her head dipped inside the fridge, she sat spread-legged with a joint between two fingers and Reid ever lovingly refused to hand over the lighter he’d snagged from her pocket. “C’mon, don’t be such a dick, man.”

“I’m not being a dick, thank you.” He said, now a raccoon with the grubbiest little man hands she’d ever seen. “This is me showin’ self-preservation skills, clue in on them.”

Cocking her head to the side, she let out an airy scoff. “You’re what?”

“Showin’ self-preservation skills, the less you do the better for **_me_ **.”

In the end, grubby little man hands were just that: grubby little man hands. They did nothing for when she lifted up and wormed the lighter away, leaving Reid to make grabby hands with partially bared teeth—all the while cursing under his breath—until she lit it, dutifully handing the lighter back, and slouching right into the dent she’d made in this seat; then his masked face fell and he climbed up beside her. Back turned and bushy tail wrapped around his body as far as it’d go.

Hear her out, she’s not fifty shades of unashamed, she really isn’t and this situation really paints it on the contrary. It just… her family has always been the motivator to at least pretend to get better, to be better, if it wasn’t for her mom or her sister she’d have ditched every attempt to throw her into rehab and called herself a runaway for the satisfactory time being when her mom would be so happy to see she wasn’t dead or like, a prostitute, she’d not get sent off and they could carry forward on the back of Rue’s _promise I’ll do betters_ and nothing would change.

See, things always did. Things always changed for some period of time. 

That change was always for them. It was always for them, and she only ever tried in hopes that she could somehow give them the lives in the suburbs that they deserved. In a perfect world, she would. For them, she’d be different, she’d be better, she’d be a sales rack and would be ever-goddamn-changing to fit their needs, and she’d be able to handle her own brain to do that. 

But that wasn’t how life worked and she really couldn’t handle her own brain and she really couldn’t handle the extension of it that refused to even look her in the eye half the time; watching Reid’s sides rise and fall, slower and slower each time. The effects of the drugs she did always hit him first. They’d learned that early on, when she’d take her daily medications as a kid, he was always mellowed out before her skin thought about stopping its niggling buzzing. They’d also learned that whatever he managed to consume would hit her first, too, some sort of pseudo-telepathic shit or something. 

“You gotta eat,” Rue’s mom had said, and her cheetah daemon, Ossian, nosed the plate of organic eggs, bacon, and a peach jam slathered piece of toast toward her. She was fourteen and it was her first time hitting a _different_ kinda withdrawal; not from any meds with her name she’d been so lucky to choke down either, no, she’d met a weird dude that talked like a sloth moved and probably wasn’t operating on this plane of existence and... Yeah, no, he sold her oxycontin and she took it cause it sounded alright at the time and it’s hard to think a dude with a goldfish as his once-daemon is threatening. “You gotta eat, Rue, you leave for the bus in ten minutes. C’mon, hurry up.”

“I can’t…” She whispered, bags hanging under her eyes and the taste of soured milk in the back of her throat. Reid was a cuckoo pecking feverishly at her water. “I’ll fuckin’ hurl it up.”

Then he was an opossum, easing his way carefully past her plate to sniff at her hand, brows pushed up before he sat down. “She’ll know you did that,” he pointed at the toast with a worm-y finger. “Eat that. It’ll help.” When she looked at him with a stare she knew was ungodly vacant, he drooped. “Please.”

“Can’t,” Rue said.

“Okay,” Reid said and sniffed the bacon just to gobble it down in the weirdest fucking way she’d ever seen any daemon do. “I’ll try...” He ended up eating the whole plate and didn’t think twice because he was sure the toast would make her feel better. 

It did.

After every proceeding withdrawal incident, he’d do the same, repeat it all and eat whatever it took to make sure she wasn’t pointed out as sick. Sometimes he wished he didn’t, she can tell, but he never stopped until not eating wasn’t the issue anymore. 

Sometimes, when things slip far enough, she wants to change for him, too. Part of her believes he deserves some sort of normalcy or at least a person that acts like they’re apart of him.

Sometimes, when she looks at him, all the forms he takes and all the things he is, all she can see is that he’s a testament to how fucked up she is and how it doesn’t matter what he thinks or feels; he’s part of her after all.

And Rue was never one to do positive things for herself. 

“What the fuck, Rue?” Sounded, and she blinked to see Fezco and his floppy-eared Doberman daemon, Bindy, slowly trotting behind him. 

She angled her head his way, just barely. “What? What, what, what, what?”

Fezco slumped into the couch with finesse, leg slung up on the ottoman all in the same motion, while Bindy continued on her sloth-y path until she was nose to nose with a hardly interested Reid. “Come on now, bruh, you owe me a hundred and twenty bucks.”

“My bad, man, I forgot.” Rue drawled, offering up the blunt that he took as slowly as he talked.

“Shit, you know I ain’t trippin’.” He said, and after a beat and a lax look over, he continued. “Well, to be honest with you, your whole drug shit got me feeling kind of uneasy.” 

Nape of her neck swaddled in a nest of pillows, she chuckled and gave a corner grin. “Come on, don’t go soft on me, Fez.”

Bindy climbed onto the couch, giving lazy licks to Reid’s head that almost made Rue laugh. “No, I’m not. It’s just that… I like you. And I missed you, bruh, like that shit at the beginning of summer had me scared as fuck.”

“Yeah, you and everybody else.” It filtered out like another breath, simply cause she cared about it so little like one.

“I’m serious, Rue, I’ve seen a lot of people die.” Fezco turned to her, eyes the most here she’d seen them since she got back, and he shook his head. Voice low but his intentions somewhere beneath that. “None like you. I don’t know what type of fucked up shit you got goin’ on inside your head, I don’t know how to help but I can tell you one thing: this drug shit is not the answer.”

Reid’s soggy ears perked at that and his muzzle poked away from the capybara hands he’d found himself in. Rue only sighed, choking on the air lost in her throat because, maybe deep down or deeper than that, she might’ve agreed. Sensible Rue wanted to. Sensible Rue may have even considered it, but sensible Rue also couldn’t breathe if she couldn’t count all the dots painted on the classroom ceilings before class was over, and sensible Rue couldn’t handle being inside her own skin without biking… and biking… and she’d continue to bike but no matter how far or fast she’d bike she’d always be left with the static under the dermis.

Sensible Rue liked to read and had hobbies and sometimes she even liked eating shitty McDonald’s burgers with her mom and sister while watching shittier B horror movies on the weekend, and sensible Rue couldn’t manage the emotions that tottered in her head because she didn’t have the option to be out with friends simply because she didn’t have any. Rue fucking hated being alone and Reid was so fucking help with that, either.

_That’s the shitty thing about this whole daemon thing, if you hate yourself it’s sorta hard to like them._

Fezco understood… or nodded like he did when she tried to put that into words that weren’t: “Shit’s fucked inside there, ya’ know?”

It was though.

Oh, it was.

* * *

Perched on her shoulder again, Reid—a ferret once more—rode calmly through the swamp of people as Rue pushed to the front of the mass. Everyone’d collected at the outskirts of the kitchen and high curiosity was livid in both of them. Now, as far as house party’s go, this one was no more interesting than one would expect of a two-story house being packed full with underaged girls, frat boys, and like… a gazillion daemons high or drunk off their shits. So neither got the hype around everyone being there but, in the long scheme of this party, a kitchen surrounded by half the goers sounded ten times more interesting than anything that'd happened.

A yelp shot across the kitchen as Nate’s Anatolian shepherd daemon, Sylph, skittered behind him, bulky mass nearly tripping them both as they backed away from the pinkish-blonde wielding a knife, and the caracal at her side, bearing its teeth. “I was fucking kidding!” Nate shouted, shirtless and ever terrified. “Put the fucking knife down, okay. It was a joke.”

“You wanna fucking hurt me?” She’d screamed, and the caracal hissed as the shepherd lost its footing and nearly tapped it with a stray paw. “You have no fucking idea!” And _slich_ went the blade cutting through flesh and sparked the crowd to throw frenzy of exclamations, but the caracal that bit into its own front leg to draw fire-bright blood was what sent the house up in a wave of WWE announcer noises that even Rue winced at.

As though it was some battle cry, the pair went in unison, “We're fucking invincible!” 

Sylph barked, a whine lacing her throat strongly, "They're fucking freaks!" and jumped away from the blood and liquid gold that splattered on the tiles. 

“What the fuck?” Voice hollowed out and dry, Nate pulled on the chains around Sylph's neck and continued to slip back. The room stilled, only the sound of chattering masked the awkward silence that would’ve otherwise risen, no doubt. 

After shaking her head slightly, she scanned the room, with the caracal twitching its weirdly decorative ears. “By the way, I’m Jules,” she blurted with a tense smile that faded, appeared, faded once. “That’s Celeste.”

“We just moved here.” Said Celeste to no one in particular, simply through her feline, awkward, biting grin. Then, as quick as the tension rose, the pair left. 

With his tiny hands, Reid slid from her shoulder down her arm to take the form of a mouse halfway down, mouth agape and his buck teeth on wide display. “I mean… right?” Rue asked, eyes squinted and her mind bugged out. Not that slicing open your arm was a logical response but… logical wasn’t exactly that interesting, was it? 

“Right,” Reid nodded, tail held in his hands. “Right.”

* * *

Now, on the list of the worst decisions ever, following the girl and her daemon that’d just went to town on their arms like it was a competition probably wouldn’t be on the top; it wouldn’t exactly be on the bottom either so technically it was a neutral option that was utterly harmless. And only out of the goodness of her curious heart did she act on the need to walk over and ensure the pair weren't going to, in some hypothetical sense because the cuts didn't look deep, bleed out. “Yo!” Rue shouted, slowed when the bike jingled. “Shit, uh… are you okay?”

Jules craned her head, the pinkest portions of her hair falling into her eyes, like they wanted to hide the awkward glance she got anyway. “Uh, uh, yeah. It’s fine. Guess I knew it was gonna get violent,” she lifted, this time, one hand firm on the bike’s handle and the other brushing back those stubborn portions to showcase the darkest blue eyes Rue’d ever seen. “and I didn’t wanna break a cheekbone or some shit.” 

“Yeah, no, no, I totally like, get the logic behind it. But…” Rue shrugged, heart-thumping once when Jules stood fully up, several inches taller in this perspective. 

“It’s still fucking insane,” Reid commented from the edge of her hand, nose twitching in the caracal’s direction. 

Rue stared at Jules, she blinked.

One of them blinked. 

Someone blinked; then she extended her hand. “I’m Rue.”

“I’m Jules.” And a clammy, kind of bloody handshake was given. 

“I’m Celeste.” chirped the caracal, tilting on her back legs to sniff the mouse-y form.

“Reid— _hey_ , don’t sniff me, your nose is wet.” 

There was an awkward bite of teeth, a little sway of her hips before Rue asked: “Where are you headed to?”

“Home. Probably.” Jules smiled, a terse kinda smile that aired on the way of nonchalance. 

Rue swayed her hips once more. “Can I come with you?”

There was a wordless succession: it started with a thinning of Rue’s lips and Jules’ smile turning to a Cheshire cat grin that would’ve rocked the movie way better because it looked so deviously pretty and so truthfully soft, it transitioned into Rue situating on the bike seat with her as Reid took the form of a twitchy red wolf that curiously circled Celeste, who circled him right back before the pair were jumping to catch up as Jules started the bike to wherever her home was. And nothing was ever quite so fucking peaceful as when Rue had her arms wrapped around Jules’ torso, and how she leaned her head against her shoulder as she counted the thumps of her heart when they’d go slightly downhill.

Or the pants of the daemons that went back and forth as Celeste chirped in annoyance as Reid shifted from various birds just to simply coast on gusts of summer wind while she had to gallop and sprint to keep up.

Little did any of them know what this ride was going to lead them down the road of.

But just remember; this was where the weird shit started.


	2. Four Minutes Is What It Took To Fall For Her

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Given that canon has made a lot of stupid choices, I've elected to ignore everything but what I like. 
> 
> Alright, hopefully this will be the last author's note for a bit, but with the current state of the show and how... loose it feels right now along with it generally being very into this Nate situation, I'm going to be plucking stuff from canon as I need and want instead of going beat-for-beat like in the first chapter. Making this story very AU now and very Rue and Jules-centric... as it should be.

In this moment, Rue was all that she wasn't outside of these four walls and their focused breaths; she was attentive, tender, and careful. Her fingers were gentle as she wiped blood from the gash, they curved ever so lightly to press the antiseptic-soaked rag into the wound enough to ensure any debris was gone and no infection would rise—how screwed would she be in the eyes of some hypothetical, maybe-He-exists-God if she gave a literal angel sepsis? That, she decided, was not something she wanted to linger on and continued with rubbing the rag over pale skin that'd gone reddish-pink from the blood trying to stain and the annoyance the dermis received from being assaulted with a rough cloth. 

Whenever Jules would wince, she'd mutter something indistinguishable but would make it sound like an apology, she didn't really know why she couldn't say it but a niggling itch in the back of her mind loathed the idea of being the source of pain for _her_. The concept of hurting the girl she knew as Jules Vaughn was something she refused to venture far into and would backstep and make her mental amends by going slower than a fucking snail the next wipe then she'd rinse the rag, wash, repeat.

Celeste and Reid had made their drawn lines clear—much to the caracal's dismay, who looked like she did want to bridge them—but Reid sat stock-still as a meerkat, his animal brows furrowed and his back bristled. "He changes a lot," Jules said softly, her blue eyes flitting back and forth before landing on Rue's determined expression. 

"It's— _he's_ weird, I know. D'you have the other one?" Rue gestured with the rag in her hand for the dry one buried somewhere beneath the blankets. Celeste obliged, dipping beneath the thick comforter to pull up the rag and set it beside her, and Rue picked it up to dry off the edges. 

Jules stared at her, the silence could've been suffocating had Rue not been concentrating on the way she felt eyes working her up and down, God no, that felt intoxicating in the most second-hand way. "He's weird? You're _both_ weird," she corrected, as though it was confusing that Rue saw Reid as an entity separate from herself. "Not for the changing stuff though."

"Sounds fake but okay," There were other reasons both of them would be weird, all by his association with her of course and none of his own doing, he was too weird to actually do anything but be wrong. Rue tossed the rag to the side and lifted up the box of square gauze pads to place dutifully across the wound. "Why're we weird then?" 

There was a minute shared between the caracal and the blonde, one of a look that seemed knowing, connected in that way Rue saw on every human and daemon pair, and some of her scoffed as Reid shuffled further away from her when she looked to him, then she did the same in succession. Jules turned back, and Celeste stood, walked in a tight circle, then rested her head on Jules' bare thigh, carefully licking at the bandage around her own furry arm. "You kinda went home with the girl and her daemon who went, like, off the edge in front of a whole party," Celeste and Jules drew out a laugh in unison, a soft laugh that Rue's heart fluttered to hear. "If said girl was anyone but me I'd say that'd make you kinda fucking weird in my eyes, so to everyone else..."

Reid blew out harshly, and Rue grabbed the roll of bandage to carefully wrap around Jules' gauze-covered wound that'd probably need to be fixed later because she was certain that was too many pads for real, but she couldn't be too sure, then she snipped the piece from the sparse roll with scissors and tucked the loose end beneath the tight-ish wrap of a forearm. "We're pretty fucking weird," Rue finished, unspooling her limbs to stretch back and then letting them sprawl out as she laid on her back. Reid twitched his nose and turned to face her, curling up as close to the edge of the bed as possible, his beady eyes staring tired holes into hers. "I don't think I give a fuck about what everyone thinks though." She lied.

After a beat, "I don't think I do either," Jules' lips turned up in the cheekiest smile as she flopped down beside Rue. They were sharing a pillow and the softest gaze, brown eyes and blue hues mixing together to melt Rue a little. "I dunno how I'm gonna deal with being friends with somebody that doesn't got an impulse control though, like what am I gonna do if you find another blonde that goes as hard as me and that knife incident?" She laughed again and Celeste trudged up to curl against her side. 

"I'd never replace you," it slipped before she knew it did and realized quickly that that wasn't at all what Jules implied. Reid perked up, bristled again as he went from a meerkat to an alert otter sidling in between the pair, Jules didn't know him well enough to see how much of a show it was and Rue couldn't stop her eye roll because he was a God awful actor.

Chirping, he interrupted any awkward silence and wiped that confused expression off Jules' face as Celeste stretched across her to sniff at him, her large ears pricked and her face humanly excited when he didn't shove her away. "Your nose hasn't suddenly stopped being wet," he snuffed, but she continued investigating. "I don't like it."

"Otters like the water though, yeah?" Celeste said. "Wet noses shouldn't bother you."

"No," and he was recoiling, Rue felt it, emotionally receding as she wanted to whenever the obvious was stated. "I'm not an otter, I don't like water and I don't like your wet nose." Then he was slipping away, a dark brown rat now as he slunk over Rue's leg and dipped behind her calves. Celeste followed, bounding around before settling beside him.

Softly, she whispered, "What _are_ you then?"

Rue wouldn't ever be sure what he said, even years from now when she is in college with a roommate and a schedule and a plan that maybe isn't a plan at all, but she swore she heard a mousey, "I don't know," before the daemons fell into a quiet that spoke louder than either did. Jules poked Rue's arm a moment later, cheeky smile back and her eyes tediously sweeping over Rue's face, and Rue mapped hers in the same time; counting a tiny mole on her right cheek, the way her nose curved down ever so slightly, the way her cheeks had the boldest lines when she smiled, and how that smile was a perfect press of lips and the glint of teeth that shined in what light came from the window, and the clock ticked on the opposite wall in the rhythm her heart should have... maybe... probably beat. 

In utter fucking honesty, her heart failed to fall behind that clock, instead, it raced like a hare and she felt her throat throb and knot up as she swallowed back the sight of Jules reaching for her hand to hold, lacing their fingers and letting them fall as one; and Rue waited thirty ticks exactly before brushing back a strand of blonde hair behind Jules' ear, relishing in the way a cheek pressed to her palm as if to keep this contact going longer. It fell, and Rue looked to the clock as it thrummed in tandem with her heart and she realized that both felt slower, _four minutes_ , she thought as her head hit the pillow again. Four minutes. A lot could happen in four minutes. Yet all that happened in their four minutes was Rue's realization that she wished she could live in an endless loop of shared glances, Jules' hand wrapped around hers, of existing where her daemon wasn't settled and that was fine because she didn't have one; all she had was their four minutes and Jules' hand in hers and some part of her that felt a little numb. 

"Hey," Rue said finally, brushing back a thin strand of hair just to rub her thumb over Jules' temple.

"What?" Jules asked, her voice slowly gone hoarse as their night progressed and time refused to slow down for them. 

A tick of the clock, and a beat of her heart, Rue asked, "Wanna get high?" and grinned.

Jules did too, smiling in a way that felt more Cheshire than cheeky. "Yeah," and Reid snuffed loudly.

* * *

Rue craved the calm in the storm of a drug with no name she could fucking remember and no normal person would give two shits about, and she enjoyed the nothingness in the personally created abyss where she could inhale, exhale, and not feel two seconds from popping like a balloon too full of helium. In some sense, she knew she was chasing something unachievable, but that was the thing, it never felt unachievable. Whenever that chosen substance passed her lips and hit her system and intoxicated her blood with things with names and purposes she'd probably cringe at if put into layman's terms and not Ashtray tongue, it was so fucking achievable and she could breathe.

There was a release to her breaths and a wetness to the tears that took to her eyes, she inhaled and smelled things and wasn't perpetually stuffy, she inhaled and noticed Jules must really like to use some sorta strawberry perfume that she'd gag at if anyone else wore but found absolutely tasteful from _her_.

And she could count each step she rolled down like a sack of Rue-potatoes as she fell into something for Jules that felt like four minutes of shared glances and a world where they existed. No extensions of themselves just... _them_. Rue thought the bottom of this fall would break a rib, shatter some vertebrae, but one could debate that she glided as gracefully down as a goose was polite, but the reality of that impact wouldn't hit for a few weeks, she'd learn. Right now though, she was fucking—"Are you **o k a y**?"

Jules looked on with glitter under her eyes, wavering like a reflection in water that'd had a stone skipped across it, and Rue could only wheeze through a loose-lipped smile, "I'm just..." and Reid chirped. "So happy. I'm so **h a p p y**."

And Jules fell to her side with an airy laugh and Celeste a sprawled out mass of paws and ears beside her. 

Reid rolled, now a raccoon, his tiny hands stretched out in front of him. "I'm me," he said in awe, but his face turned when he saw Rue slide, slide, and slowly ease to stretch out on the floor. "You're me..."

"I'm you?" Rue asked, trying to wrap her mind around how fucking weird that was, he was her, or was she him? 

"I'm you," Reid said glumly, his hands falling to his stomach, head low and his whiskers twitching. "Oh."

It was times like these when she could sort of grasp that mutual... corporeal manifestation of her soul shit, because he was as fucked as her, and couldn't hide it as well as he thought when they were high. "Oh," she echoed, pulling him closer to her, and he went willingly because they felt small and huge and broken and like pristine china all at once, and she hugged him because he didn't deny it, and he curled into her chest because he hated not pretending they were better than they were.

A hand stretched out to lace fingers, and Rue eagerly clasped a free hand to grasp Jules'.

They smiled; Rue because it was Jules, and Jules because she thought that this was probably the best friend-assuming moment all those 90's movies gawked about and she felt special because of it.

"Happy still?" Jules asked, tone drowsy but cheerful, her eyeshadow a bit smudged and her skin all bumpy from the cold floors and her lacking attire. 

Rue stared, "With you? Like right now?" then nodded. "I'm so happy,"


	3. Intro to the Me and You

If there was anything more annoying than rehab—and there were a lot of things on that list—it was what came after. The piss tests, the side-glances, the fact that everyone and their dog knew she had OD'd and everyone and their dog still got surprised when she was very clearly not dead, but the one thing she loathed the most was her mom and Ossian, starting every morning with, "You're both looking better," as though outward appearances coincided with the state of her innately flawed mind. 

"Thanks," Reid said each time because he loved when people thought he was different, and she'd be lying if she didn't relish in the attention of doing something everyone seemed to like, but she loathed _that_ more than the questions. The fact she knew she—no, _they_ because he was as much a fuck up as her—they weren't sober, they weren't clean, and he knew it but he knew he loved being good so much more so his goody-two-shoes self tossed out enough morals to find lying justifiable; some of her wanted to show them that half of the reason why Reid couldn't ride in her pockets was that she couldn't risk a baggie of _something_ falling out in the hallway again—and she didn't want him nearer than he had to be before it hurt—and that he was lying and so stupidly caught up in his fucking moronic fantasy that they weren't **flawed**. 

That remained a persistent thing on the bus ride to school as Reid hugged the outer aisle as a small dog and Gia held her daemon Adoni, who was currently an elf owl and preening himself. "You came back late," Gia said under the chorus of chatting voices. "Very late." Adoni punctuated before he settled against her stomach. 

" _I_ was with a friend." Rue meant it, she really did. 

Doe-eyes looked up to her and she thanked whatever celestial being listening for wearing sunglasses so that Gia couldn't see how that expression tore at her and begged to rip her in two. "You sure...?" That hurt; she wished that her hand hadn't wrapped around the bag in her sweatshirt pocket for some sort of solace. 

Rue rubbed a knuckle over her nose, turned her head and sideways grinned. "Why would I fuckin' lie to you? C'mon, G, be real," and she laughed... waited for the smallest glimpse of a smile from Gia, and swallowed another chuckle when she was rewarded as Gia grinned passively and nodded. "See? No biggie, stop worrying so much. I was out with a friend thas' all."

Twitching then tilting his head, Adoni said, "A _good_ friend?"

Thinking of gentle hands, soft skin, and a glinting smile, Rue cheesily rolled her head back to the window. "A real good friend, she's a good fucking person man, you wouldn't believe it."

"Weird daemon though," Reid peeped, and Gia diverted her attention to Adoni and Reid's conversation occurring at floor level.

Rue's eyes remained flitting over buildings the bus passed as the trio went back and forth with a low glee she couldn't embody if she consumed the whole bag her hand was wrapped around, it was always so hard to think when your daemon was so preoccupied, like the froth of a headache that promised to come as a sledgehammer through a solid concrete wall. Rue said nothing as she pulled a knee into her chest and rested her head on top of it to combat the dizzying nausea that'd been creeping through her system like a plague rat through Europe streets. Unsure as to whether it was the shitty withdrawal fucking her or the fact she couldn't get those doe-eyes out of her mind every time her fingers grazed the plastic.

When they left the bus, it hadn't struck her that Reid was still a dog, a scrappy looking thing that might as well have been a snail with the way he slunk along the ground with his ears pinned against his skull and his short tail tucked between his legs. "I feel," he whined in a whisper, head drooping. "bad. I feel **_bad bad bad_**."

She said nothing. What good would come of complaining? 

Instead, she bent down and reached her hand out for him as he took on the shape of a harvest mouse and shuffled under her sleeve with a hamster-ish ailing squeak she understood so well. Rue trekked the slithering eyes of the student body, the hushed words, the stares judgemental enough to belong to her mother, and slunk like the daemon-dog once did. 

They didn't agree on much - if anything - but they did agree on this; they didn't want to be seen.

* * *

"Where's Reid?" Jules asked, on Rue's left with a beam between them as they watched students come this way and that way. Celeste was a confident presence at her human's shoes, ears twitching at any and every conversation happening around them. 

Dutifully, Rue held up her right arm and its sleeved hand. "Sick," she said flippantly, then, after a beat, "So am I."

"Awh, poor dude, you doin' good in there?" it was a gentle coo that he wiggled at, a bit too jittery considering Rue's belly did the exact same about the closeness imposed so swiftly.

"S'weird, man, I dunno... I just," Rue sucked in a breath, scanned the room, then exhaled. "Hate this. All this." Celeste's ears pricked at that, nose twitching as her sleeve moved with Reid's uncomfortable shifting around at the crook of her arm. "It feels like everyone's staring, it's awful."

From the sleeve, Reid peeped, "S'gross."

As if that brought pep to her step, Celeste stomped to all fours, then went to her back legs in a lemme see manner. "You're not mute," she said, almost as gently as Jules did and he rolled a very not mouse-y purr in his throat that Rue felt in her chest. "That's just lovely and it sucks, the whole thing really, but... like, people think you two died. That's not bad-bad considering you aren't."

"Yeah," Jules grinned and stretched out her pale arm that still had reddish remnants around the edges of the bandage. "I think we win. In terms of shitty assumptions people will have, I think we really do." 

Rue winced. Reid snuffed hastily. "Right, but we died, can you imagine getting the nickname Casper? Five people already called me that. Pretty shitty,"

"Close but no cigar," Celeste said as the bell rang out and the collection of bodies around them increased as students hurried to reach their classes. 

"We still win." Jules, laughing with more air than _umpf_ , effortlessly took Rue's hand in hers and led her through the hall. "C'mon, les'go," and Rue went, loving getting pulled along by this ridiculous girl and her even more ridiculous daemon; knowing full well that, without a doubt, wherever Jules pulled her, she'd follow.

Rue knew she'd always follow. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how I'm going to work with season one's offerings but I'm gonna try; buckle up now I suppose? Thanks for confusion, no way to recover, and Zendaya's song, canon. Also... new tag. We're in it, buds.


	4. Pursuit of Happiness (or is it?)

It almost felt like a laughable proposition when the teacher asked Rue to speak—brought onto the staff by the board this week, Rue knew because no one looked so unhappily cookie cutter in this forsaken town as that woman did, and there was no prepared lesson so they were asked to pass around some metaphorical stick at a non-existent campfire—but when that laughable offer was twisted into a firm demand, she was sure her stomach was going to sink through her shoes, heart hammering, chest working into uneven breaths as she stepped onto the stage slowly. The spotlight in front of her beat down in a steady imposing beam, she wrapped her arms around herself and sniffed the sweatshirt she wore as if it'd bring some sort of solace. In her sleeve, Reid operated nervously, his hands twitched against her as he _taptaptaptapped_ her as though she could fix this and get them out of this fucking mess.

"What did you do over the summer, Rue? It doesn't have to be anything grand, it just has to be... something." Said the teacher once more and her daemon, a barred owl, clicked his beak and shook out his feathers in a sharp show of disapproval of this slow reaction.

Rue fidgeted, unwrapped, rewrapped, then unwrapped her arms from herself once more and swallowed harshly. It felt like her throat was closing up, violently barbed and constricting, tearing into its own flesh to make itself tighter wound. The spotlight continued to bear down and she couldn't see past it, couldn't imagine a time where this light wasn't pulling apart her pores and slipping inside to burn beneath her skin. In front, she could hear the rustle and whispering of assholes and their asshole daemons. "I... uhm," and her voice broke in half, shattering on impact with the air and she swallowed down the shards of a sentence she couldn't manage.

"I was, uh, with my mom and my, uh, little sister and we were listening to this... this song," Rue said finally, hating the way her voice shook and how her throat worked up a thick-saliva prelude to a sob she'd rather dissolve than let out in front of people who'd welcome such vulnerability to pick through like raccoons in garbage. So that's where her story ended, because in retrospect, maybe it did, it ended with a song and a car ride that began after she'd woken up from a coma with her little sister on one side and her mom on the other, the definition of tired strewn across their faces, their daemons worse for wear, and Reid... Reid a limp hare pressed against her side, the remnants of gold still speckled his coarse, brown fur from where she'd drug him through an OD and he had the perseverance to stay alive but marred and _loyal_. She recalled crying silently at the images laced through her brain and some low, buried part of her wished that had just died. Remained a solid nothingness. It felt kinder than reality, it was gentler than breathing, and Reid wouldn't be tied to her by any painful and invisible string; he could go his way and she could run the other. But there she was, inhaling and exhaling on spluttering sobs, realizing that wasn't dead and she had to be _here_.

There'd been so much she did that he could conceal or fix or rectify to lessen the punishment she otherwise would've received, and it churned her belly and tore her breaths into tangible things that subtly choked her on the way out, because he couldn't stop this, and he was still tied to her. Loyal and better and more than her because she wasn' sure she could ever remain so unwavering had he been the one to dissolve into gold dust and nothingness. "I..." Rue stumbled through her words as Reid pressed against her, body shaking, morose squeaks silent to every other ear but hers it felt like. 

Maybe it all ended with a song and a car ride to rehab; maybe it all ended with one last blowing out as Rue—in a haze of drugs and anger and so much _hurt_ —recalled waving a shard of glass at her mom like she was some modern-day motherfucking knight and her mother was nothing more than an obstacle, an interfering dragon intent on breaking her down with fire-laced words. Rue recalled Reid so uncharacteristically baring his teeth at Ossian as the biggest wolf he could fathom, she asked him if he regretted it once they were admitted to the facility, and he said he didn't remember feeling anything but regret since she dipped her toes into the metaphorical pool of drugs and stupid decisions—maybe it all ended there because she couldn't recall feeling anything but an overwhelming sensation of **_lost_**. 

Though her sleeves covered them, her hands trembled, rattling violently and recklessly.

Rue's throat throbbed and a whimper slipped through her lips. The edges of her eyes collected an armful of tears that should've spilled, and she swore they didn't because they knew she'd spill with them; onto this stage. Erratic breaths, a heaving chest that stayed risen longer than it remained fallen, puffing up up up as she couldn't manage to find the rhythm of inhale, exhale, repeat.

As if the light grew brighter, she winced and squinted her eyes and let out a whine so high-pitched and long she could've gagged on its coattails. "I'm sorry but I can't think of anything so," and she swore the teacher peeped up, but her words were spiraling like suds down a drain, and her voice was broken and weak and wavering, and her tears were threatening to pour over and the light was too bright and her breath was hitching and stuttering and and and—"Ah... I'm not, I'm nuh— _so... I can't_ _do this_." Rue loathed how soft and shattered she sounded as her words fell like air.

Somewhere beyond the light, where she could hardly see even if she squinted, she could still hear two people and their daemons chattering, "Honestly, I bet it's brain damage," one said... someone said and she ground her teeth, lips tight around them as though it'd keep her sounds from escaping. 

“Isn’t she the one with the unsettled daemon? I think she already had brain damage,” another said. 

Another someone in the crowd spoke, "Honestly? You're being fucking rude." a someone familiar that she couldn't place because that statement was followed by an alien-to-her-ears growl, and Rue blinked. Dripping tears down her cheeks that she quickly wicked away before looking to the doors of the gym, back to the spotlight, and she knew it was the stupidest thing to but she swallowed and... _left_.

* * *

When she readied that line on the toilet paper holder, she saw Reid's complacent nature, his worried look and his soft, "No more, please..." but he didn't enforce, and somehow that made her feel better about doing it because it proved some fucked up theory that he enjoyed it too. Yet she was an inch and a half away from an ignorant bliss when the bathroom door creaked open and shoes tapped up to her stall, Reid chirped and turned into a ferret and looked at the canine paws slowly coming up too—so he took the bag from her hand and tossed it into the toilet as Rue scrambled to dust away the blue-ish powder as if she was a fucking hoover.

Like the most incriminated pair, she seamlessly flushed the toilet with her shoe and unlocked the stall door with the other as he scaled her arm to sit atop her shoulder like a less colorful parrot.

However, she wished she'd thought about looking when Lexi was who spoke, "Rue, it's me." she said just as the door opened, and her eyes looked up like suspicious saucers. "Are you okay?" Some of Rue rather adored how low Lexi's voice dropped when she was intrigued or concerned, and the rest of Rue fucking hated that Lexi was intrigued or concerned about _her_. At her side her daemon, a tricolor Welsh sheepdog, Paxton; one ear floppy while the other stood erect, and his short coat so very shiny, looked to Reid.

"You're so fucking stupid, Lexi." Rue gritted out because her brain didn't feel like filtering her thoughts from her intentions, or maybe it lost the ability to and maybe it just hated how much Lexi reminded her of what she was—wasn't any longer, could no longer be, would never be—and she shoved past. Paxton made some disgruntled noise as he stepped out of the way.

"Why?" Paxton asked, his voice deep but high enough that it didn't sound settled like he was, innocently pitched Rue always said.

Accusatory, and quick to bite like a cornered animal, Rue turned around with her brows furrowed and stared Lexi down. "Because I already flushed everything down the fucking toilet," and it came out sharp-edged and bitter.

Lexi remained stagnant, firm in her place though her expression didn't get less perplexed. "Well, we just came to check on you both." Paxton nodded, his upright ear twitching as Reid took the form of that harvest mouse and slipped into the cave of Rue's hood.

Like she'd shoved it in a furnace, her face burned hot. "I don't—" and she threw a fist at a stall door, knocking it back and making it crack loud as it collided with the wall; she cringed at the impact of bone on pink-fucking-material, and brought her hand back to clasp both of them together. "I don't want you to fucking check on me or Reid! Whether we're both fine or whether we're not! What difference are two you going to make?" In this moment it didn't feel like she could've ever been the person Lexi thought she was seeking out to comfort. There was nothing kind or soft or worth it left behind. There was nothing worth the effort because that once-worth-it-girl was gone; if she ever existed in the first place. Reid emerged from the hood as a mouse and was a heavy, foreboding presence as a raven perched on her shoulder, and she couldn't fucking stop herself once she started... some of her wanted to, it hurt not to, it'd hurt if she didn't, and she hated not being able to tell herself how to react because Lexi looked so small and determined and so much like Reid that Rue could've been seeing personality doubles. That pissed her off. "What? What? You gonna give me some life advice? You gonna fucking help us?"

Nostrils flaring and her shoulders squared, she knew she was a force that'd set Lexi stepping out of her way as she headed for the sinks. "Well, you're like one of my best friends..."

"Give me a fucking break!" Rue snapped, cutting around to lower herself to Lexi's level, ignoring the yelp and flinch both her and her daemon made as Rue stepped closer. "Because we went to fucking pre-school together? That does _**not** _make us best-fucking-friends."

It took a moment of silence as Rue bent over the sink, her shadowed eyes prevalent in the mirror, when Paxton snuffed a whine and Lexi crossed her arms tight, her voice the lowest Rue'd heard it... and so fucking thick with some emotion that sounded like it hurt. "You say all this but what happens in three days when you knock on my door asking me to piss in some Tylenol bottle?" Sniffing, Rue watched her own eyebrows knit together into a scowl and tight-lipped suppressant on words. "What, you gonna say the opposite? How we've known each other since pre-school and we're best friends?"

"It's like you both have a split personality disorder," Paxton muttered.

Shaking her head, Lexi rubbed Paxtons and turned, voice watery as she left, "Sorry that I miss the old you."

There was nothing redeeming about her any longer, because she'd stolen that old girl with a bottle of pills and a reckless abandon and no fucking axis to rotate on who now had the need of forgetting... not being... hardly existing—maybe Rue missed the old her too, but that didn't matter, any remnants of that girl was lost to the OD. 

Rue rested against the sink, and Reid was a mouse again.

Good.

* * *

In retrospect, Rue had the regret of not listening to Fez's pleads for her to leave when he spoke of his supplier 'Mouse' coming over; in her mind, she imagined some rich suburbs, private school white boy with a golden retriever daemon named Peter and figured Fez and Bindy could've whipped 'em both into place with no more than their capybara personalities that made everyone simply tolerate one another in their presence by default of them existing in the same room. In double retrospect, she and Reid realized there maybe wasn't something innocently criminal coming in when Fez felt for a gun between the couch cushions, pulled it up to make sure it was loaded and tucked it again; while Bindy had never looked so... fucking menacing. "I think we should go, let's go," Reid said, and she agreed, they needed to go.

"You can't," Bindy said sternly, her slang-tongue harsh as she snapped her teeth at them. 

"They're here," Ashtray's daemon, Digger, who was now a lion, warned and Fez nodded just as she assumed the shape of a wolverine and ran straight behind her human. 

Rue's stomach was about to crawl out of her throat when 'Mouse' was an old fucking asshole with a gnarled rottie, and Reid went as big as he could manage; a dark wolf with white teeth but still... he shrunk under the dog's glare and heavyset imposing body that pushed against him. Fear would be lack of a better word as her throat lodged a lump of nerves and a scream for help to _get him the fuck away from me, make him stop touching me_. Mouse imposed. So did the dog.

Yellowed teeth neared Reid's thick-furred throat yet Rue still recoiled and trembled when the combination was almost met when he gave mock-snarl, and Rue had never been so intent on getting him away and back to her so fucking badly in her life; she wanted him here, in her lap, so she could run her fingers through fur and she wallowed in that want as she imagined sobbing into it because he never asked and never needed to tell her she couldn't. Mouse grinned, and she finally spotted the gun... Reid became a small rat but that didn't stop Mouse from reaching out to him, and his dog was nosing Reid closer and Rue couldn't stop the stuffy-nosed breath that was full of _he's **mine** , not yours._

"C'mon man, don't do that," Fez said, his tone firm and his eyes solid in their path to the man... but there was a sliver of worry he gave to Rue, and she harbored that and welcomed it when that was what caused Mouse and his dog to look away in time for Reid to slip away as a snake, curling tight around Rue's arm like a fancy black forearm jewelry. 

Thinner but just as confident and apparently cold, Bindy took Fez's wordless direction as she wedged herself between the dog and where Reid was. "Leave him alone," when the rottie ignored her demand, she rephrased. "He's not in this; now I said leave him _alone_."

"What, he's _yours_?"

Bindy shook her head, her shoulders broad, she snuffed. "He's like a little brother to me, man, now back off."

In retrospect, maybe she wouldn't have taken the fentanyl like a bird with a seed-feeder, but Mouse was persistent and crawly and Bindy could only persist so much before she bordered threatening them all to get shot up like deer. The dog crept along the seat, too confident that she'd not touch Rue, or maybe she didn't care as she licked her maw and stared at the now-ferret Reid, and Mouse's hands crept ever further up her thigh that Reid sat on and was too petrified to move from because he was pinned. And there was nothing more petrifying than the thought of another person touching another person's daemon, their soul, it was as intimate as anyone could get and it was so fucking taboo that Rue didn't even find entertainment in the fact. For Reid, for her, she took it... because Mouse and the dog retreated when she did.

It fucking hurt that she did until it didn't... until Reid was a flash of change by her as she slung her head back in the euphoria fentanyl brought on; she'd never had an orgasm that wasn't shitty because she got bored with the entertaining of that with Reid in the room, and nobody she'd been with had ever hit a jackpot... but, in some sense, she figured that this was exactly how one felt. Prickly and cool and like the effect of 3D glasses and a foggy pair of binoculars all crammed in one. "Different," Reid told her as she slipped, and she agreed. "Happy but I'm not... like not... it's not happy... I feel it though..." She agreed again, but when she looked, he was out as a hare and she couldn't find the will to move.

Rue figured she was breathing... until she slipped into some nice state that wasn't nice at all but it wasn't loud or demanding interaction... it just was. Grounded. Rue felt grounded, and it's like a light show of fireworks and sparklers and Bobby Womack on repeat, it was dancing through the kitchen with no floor to keep her in place so she fell through the earth and ended in a nothingness that was everything and nothing at all. Reid isn't there and she's alone and maybe she should care but she can't because there's no emotion and there's too much and she can't focus on it all and nothing says she has to choose so _she..._

_just..._

**_doesn't._ **

Rue woke once, to Jules combing her fingers through her hair and looking down at her, and she smiled up at her because it was Jules! Goddammit, it was Jules! And oh she loved her! Jules smiled back but her eyes were crinkled and her brows were downcast in the way that was confusing. I missed you today, missed you... she said. Did she? Because Jules didn't respond and streetlights were consuming her with every single one they passed under so she slipped with the last one.

Rue hiccuped on the way down, slowly stepping down a winding staircase, because Jules' pants were soft and plush and she was warm and then... Rue blinked and didn't feel Reid when her hand grabbed out, and swallowed hard when she couldn't lift up to look for him, but Jules was brushing her hair back again and she wasn't worried, right? That was good, right? Jules wouldn't let Rue leave Reid, right?

Right?

_Reid?_

Rue felt for him... stretched and sprawled her fingers out for him but her hand didn't move and Jules brushed hair from her face again. 

_Reid?_

Rue didn't feel him.

Rue wanted to throw up but her throat couldn't bob or gag.

_Reid?_

Rue couldn't feel him and there was something euphoric and petrifying in that fact that she couldn't appreciate what she normally wanted—begged for constantly—and she anticipated the next bright light because she hated how hollow and high and _everything_ this felt. 

**_Reid!_ **

And Rue... slipped with the brightness that consumed her.


	5. Prelude to Sobriety

It was as though they woke up with the anticipation of already being **d o w n.**

Sticky and phlegmy with sweat that'd yet to dry; felt the sharp chill of air swiftly swooping under the fabric when she flopped to her back, and she stretched an arm out for something, anything other than the hollow second-hand residue of the blanket of Fentanyl. When her fingers spread, they met soft fur, sandy-plush fur she realized, Reid twitched as a lanky coyote at the touch, curled up and sleeping with his back pressed to Celeste's. 

Rue blinked. They were in Jules' bed, in Jules' room, and washed over in sunrise light that poured from the windows that cornered them; Rue reached out again and winced when her fingers brushed cooled skin that wasn't hers. "Reid?" It was a worry on the tip of her tongue that seeing him still didn't subside; seeing him was one thing, seeing him didn't mean he wasn't _here_ , she's seen enough people still be here without actually being **here** , and he's here but not responding and it doesn't align, if she's here, he's here, he can't be here without her yet her stomach still twisted and she was hot and her eyes were burning. Is he here? "Reid?" 

Lifting up lazily, his slender head turned toward her and hazel/dark brown/red eyes blinked at her. "What?" 

Breathing out hard, she drifted back to the mattress at the sound of his voice, her worries partially stunted as her hands drifted to the cooled skin, then one arm wrapped around the torso of the blonde. "Morning," she said, the prior night a hazy cloud of feelings and sensations she could no better articulate than a human could the twelve to sixteen colors a Mantis shrimp does. Rue's brain was a knotted mess, a patchwork blanket of worries, thoughts, and a yearning indescribable as the vibration of a heart thumping against her hand. "I'm sorry you had to—"

"Listen," Jules said after a beat, shifting her head back a little, and Rue adjusted to sit her head against the cooled shoulder. "I'm not kidding, Rue. I was fine with what we did the other day, it wasn't anything, but I swear I'm not trying," she sucked in a breath, her tone taking on a shaky, teary coat as she said, "I'm not trying to become best friends with someone that's gonna fucking kill themself. I've... I've got enough dramatic shit in my life that I don't - I can't..."

Rue nodded against her, lacing their fingers together in the same movement before the hand pulled away—she gently placed hers on top of it next, rubbing a thumb carefully before tugging her head back a little; chin still pressed to Jules. "Shh, it's alright... I get it, I know."

Against her leg, she felt Reid press cautiously; as if he was too scared to make the contact but too intent to let that fear stave him off. Some part of Rue found comfort in his presence. She swallowed. 

"I don't want to be around you if you don't stop using," Jules said suddenly, as Rue slipped back into the state of sunlight and partial hollowness, and she accepted that as if it was some ultimatum. It was—she realized quickly, with an erratic breath and a heavy weight rising inside her lungs—it was an ultimatum.

Jules or drugs.

Drugs or Jules.

Rue wriggled away and thought about it. Didn't reply. It was a terrifying thing.

But every ounce of Jules was wildly better than any drug Rue had ever taken; and though Rue thought about—tasted, wanted, desired—Fentanyl, she knew that again and again which one she'd choose. Fentanyl was heavenly, the best fucking high and low she'd come in contact with. Yet Fentanyl wasn't Jules.

And, loyally, lovingly, Rue would choose Jules again and again; as being with her was like being on Fentanyl... but Jules was good, and human, and kind and so fucking stunning. There was no way choosing Jules over drugs could be bad, no, not when it felt so good.

No, being sober for Jules would be great, and maybe Rue could get better but like... really **_better_**.

_Right?_


	6. Epistolary — 2019

> **August 8th —** _Reid suggested I start writing things to myself each day I'm sober so I can see the physical progress of this because sobriety is SHIT and in VAIN but, in my opinion, it's somehow even shittier because all I have to show is a single sheet of paper and the worst cramps. Reid is also being a little shit about it, I swear he acts like a motivational speaker sometimes and I wanna hurl—cause of the withdrawal too, I guess—but it doesn't matter. Wanna know why? He keeps trying to look over my shoulder to see what I'm writing; very fun, it bothers him a lot. Checkmate, buddy._
> 
> **August 9th —** _It's midnight and Reid's asleep. Some of me feels really fucking shitty hiding this from him; he feels the withdrawals too and it makes me feel weird seeing him sick. I don't know what to do. I just want something to keep for myself. I want myself. I don't even know who that is anymore, or if I can find that. He doesn't understand that._
> 
> **August 10th —** _Mom and me and Gia went out for lunch; I told her about Jules. I know she hasn't met her yet but I can't wait for them to meet. Jules is acting weird though. Not bad weird but she started talking to some guy online, I think she likes him a lot, s'all platonic for sure but it's still weird. Her and Celeste don't talk to us when they're talking to the guy._
> 
> **August 11th —** _Apparently the guy's daemon is settled as one of those huge fucking guard dogs. Jules likes that; says anyone with a dog daemon like that is bound to be protective and "loving" and "dominant", s'fucking weird. Reid doesn't like how Celeste gets so excited about the fact either, I know he says he doesn't but I'm not dumb, he hides it well but not good._

* * *

**Message from: NA ASSHOLE _[ unread ]_**

**You've missed two meetings, kid.**

**Message from: NA ASSHOLE _[ unread ]_**

**I know what you're doing and I know you think that what I said was meant to scare you. It wasn't.**

**Message from: NA ASSHOLE _[ unread ]_**

**Come to the next meeting, we can talk.**

* * *

**From Jules:**

**hey, rue, meet u for lunch?**

**To Jules:**

**Like always, why? Something up ?**

**From Jules:  
**

**yeah!** **i need u**

_**[ Rue is typing... ]** _

**From Jules:**

**i need ur advice****

**To Jules:**

**K.**

* * *

**Message from Lexi _[ unread ]_**

**Hey, we've been kind of avoiding each other since, like, the beginning of school. Wanted to apologize for being pushy that day.**

**Message from Lexi _[ unread ]_**

**Pax is too. You don't gotta accept it or reply, that's not how apologies work but, yeah, we're sorry.**

* * *

> **August 20th —** _Been relatively sober for a bit now. It's not at all fun. It is fun to feel light though. I mean, not in the physical sense; but I've been eating and I don't hurl it up, we're getting relatively okay scores in classes now but B's are kinda shitty. Me and Gia saw a movie though, in an actual theatre, it's been so long since we've done that. Since I've been in one. We still had to leave early but it's good. It was a shitty movie. We also have plans with Jules and Celeste tomorrow, I can't wait. The paper sheet stack is getting bigger. Maybe Reid was right._
> 
> **August 21st —** _Almost forgot to write today. Reid keeps joking and saying I'm starting my softcore porn business in an hour. Loser._

* * *

**From Jules:**

**ur but an artist, and i, your humble canvas.**

**From Jules:**

**celeste says these nudes fucking 'rock', i agree!! tell reid his little color lighting idea was gold. or pink? i just know i look fucking _hot_.**

**Thirty-second audio message from Jules _[ opened ]_**

**From Jules:**

**why'd u leave so early btw? u good? u sounded weird**

**To Jules:**

**Sorry. Can't talk right now. Sorry.**

* * *

**To Jules:**

**Sorry for being so weird, didn't mean to. Did you ever send those pics?**

**From Jules:**

**we talked abt it already, it's ok! i love u! we're good. and yeah, we sent em out, now we just wait for the sound of his jaw-dropping to reverberate and shake this town :p**

**To Jules:**

**Can't wait to see the results. Can I come over tonight? After dinner?**

**From Jules:**

**hmm sure. u good?**

**To Jules:**

**Don't worry about it. Talk to you in a bit, going into class.**

**Message from: Jules _[ read ]_**

**love u! good luck w/ math!**

* * *

**August 22nd —** _As long as I'm functional, I'm okay._

 **August 23rd —** _Reid's too busy being happy with our newfound normalcy to find concern in certain behaviors. I'm okay._

 **August 24th —** _I'm functional._

 **August 25th —** _I wasn't doing drugs, a pill I borrowed could maybe count but I hurled it up. I wasn't doing drugs. I always think about it. Me and Jules are odd, she's odd, I'm sick. I'm still sick, I don't even know if it's hypothetical withdrawal or my brain is like this and I'm innately fucked up._

 **August 26th —** _I wish Reid would stop pretending we're good._

 **August 27th —** _I'm good for Jules. I'm sober for Jules. I need to remember that._

* * *

**From Jules:**

**I GOT NEWS FOR U, U AND REID ARE SOFTCORE PORN GENIUSES**

**From Jules:**

**1+ Image Attachment**

**this is the one that worked some magic. i say it's the classy pink overtones that hooked him**

**To Jules:**

**It's the tits out look, maybe.**

**To Jules:**

**Did you not crop your face out? That's literally the first thing you're supposed to do, we told you to?**

**From Jules:**

**celeste and i talked about it dont worry. we just didn't want tyler to think we didn't trust him.**

**From Jules:**

**anyway, we've seen his literal dick i'm sure it's fine.**

**To Jules:**

**Reid wanted me to tell you that we watched a show on ID about this girl that literally got blackmailed into her own murder because she sent nudes with her face to some dude.**

**From Jules:**

**u both are worrywarts, we've been talking for weeks, he wouldn't do that ! we'll talk at lunch, ok?**

* * *

**To Jules:**

**Call me. I'm sorry for what happened after lunch. Just call?**

**To Jules:**

**Call me?**

**To Jules:**

**Hey?**

* * *

**To Fezco:**

**were on our way ovr, i wont need much, we hv money this time.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDITED — OCTOBER, 2019.
> 
> Went through and spruced up some of the errors throughout the first few chapters; intending to post the next chapter soon, are there still enough people into this story that'd like that?


	7. The Handling and Care of Rue Bennett's Relationships [Part One]

Rue Bennett will never fully understand the reasoning behind her kissing Jules Vaughn—in retrospect, she can denote the signs, the subtle mannerisms, the general tone of the room when she leaned forward and pressed their lips together in the heat of the moment. Her body flooding with adrenaline, anxiety, loneliness, **_love_**. In retrospect, she never saw Reid try to stop this, he only paced at her feet as that wired coyote until Celeste calmed him. In retrospect, she remembered her dad once talking about how loneliness was the route to desperation and desperation was the route to stupidity. Perhaps she was all of the above in the descending order. So knotty and twisted and fucking sick at the idea that her best friend could be in harm's way, that her best friend loved someone besides her in all the ways Rue loved her, and so desperate to keep that love in one place, unharmed, yet in the process, she shattered it all herself. Didn't she?

Like the cowards—idiots, addicts, **_fuck-ups_** —they were, Rue fled from the house with a hitch in her throat, a destination in her mind, and something to fix the everything she'd done. Years from now, she'll recall little of this adrenaline-ridden haze, except for the fact that Reid never changed, and he never told her not to go to Fezco's because those two realities stood out to her even then. 

Frantically, she rapped out beats on the protective door placed between her and the actual step closer to grasping her relief, if only Reid would stop circling her legs anxiously, his black-tipped tail strapped between his legs and his ears pinned against his skull. Uncharacteristically, he offered no words of advice, no snappy words to war her away from making the leap and getting shit-faced. No, in fact, he remained a silent sentry whose nails merely clicked on the concrete as she repeated her beats on the door.

"Who is it?" Bindy said as her and Fezco's footsteps thumped behind the door.

With a hitch in her throat and her eyes strained, Rue said, "It's me, open the door." A stifled sigh of relief escaped her. The door opened and revealed both the man and his daemon—one leaned against it, the other sat lax on the ground within Reid's view. 

"Not today, Rue," Fezco said. "Sorry,"

Shifting uncomfortably on her feet, she feigned a taut smile before her mind caught up to reality; his expression of wariness sunk her gut, and her brow furrowed into a look of pained caution. "C'mon, man, don't be a dick." 

Attentively, Bindy's ears shifted back. "We're serious," she drawled. "Y'all can't come in."

 _Click, click, click - whine,_ Reid slunk off, away from the door and to her calves. Rue clasped and unclasped her hands, heart beating unreliably. "I... Look, man, all-all I need is a few OCS."

Both man and daemon stepped away, slinking back from the door with expressions she couldn't read and didn't care to fathom, not right now. "Sorry," he said. "But we can't help you—"

 ** _"Fez."_** Unknowingly, her voice raised an octave, deepening to a shout as the muscles strained in her neck. "Fez, I had a really fucked up day, alright? Like, it's been a really really fucked up day, okay? So I need you to open the door for me, okay?" The soft click of nails on the hardwood floors announced that neither intended to press forward and her stomach knotted and burned. "Can you open the door? Please."

"We're not gonna help y'all kill yourselves," Through the screen, his piercing eyes watered and his thick brows knitted up into another facial key that she didn't give two damns about. Fezco's head dipped low, and he shook it as his voice softened, looking up at her, he said, "I'm sorry but neither of you can be comin' over here no more. So go home." It could've been the softest phrase uttered—coupled with his submissive, sinking posture as he stepped further than the length of the door, but all it did was boil something savage and sticky from deep within her gut because it _was_ a personal fucking attack. 

Vile and cruel, Rue's face seethed with heat. She pointed a finger at him, "Don't, Fez, don't close the..." making sure to tap the screen before it fell. The door slid to a close in her face. "FUCK!"

Whirling on a dime, Reid slipped between her legs and faced the doors with a scruffy growl. "Did they just lock us out?" He asked. "Did they just lock us the fuck out?"

It was as if hearing him dip into his anger was a motivator. Snapping out, her jaw clicking, she beat a fist against the metal screen. "Fez! Open the fucking door... Please, I'm begging you, just open the door." Rue's anger rose and fell sporadically. The sentence begun vicious and sunk into a plea before jumped with her erratically beating heart and she slammed both fists into the door before tracing her fingertips around the pinholes.

"Bindy! You're full of shit, man. You know you _both_ make your living off of selling drugs to teenagers? Now all of a sudden you all wanna have a fucking moral high ground?" Reid snarled it out, violently, his bottom jaw dripped with the drool that bubbled out in the ferocious snap of his jaws as his front teeth crashed with the door. 

Nose to the screen, the grit in Rue's voice came from her chest. "You're a fucking drop out drug dealer," the toxic undertones twisted around the words, puncturing each letter like a prong collar looped too tight. "You know that? You're a fucking drop out drug dealer with seven functioning fucking brain cells and your inbred lookin' ass daemon owns fucking five of 'em." After a pause, seething in this volatile silence, she slammed and bashed her palms into the door. A soggy scream backing her words. _"Open the doors!"_

Pressed to the side of her leg now, Reid bristled; his hackles raised and his pink gums showing as his snarls were nearly wild."Fuck you, Fez!" He shouted. "Fuck you, Bindy, you slow piece of lamebrained scruff." either would know whose emotions the other was feeling—whether Reid emulated hers, or she simmered in his—but the pair knew one thing; they were undeniably, unequivocally, pissed.

"Okay..." Rue drawled and thought. Chest heaving wildly, she spun in a circle before getting back close to the door. Biting out a smile, her nose wrinkled up and her jaws ground into one another. "Are you doing this because you care about me? If you gave a shit about me, you wouldn'ta sold me the fucking drugs in the first place! But you did!" Building a knot in her throat, the words wound in it before unspooling from her tongue like an inverted prayer amidst her desperation for help, help, help. "You fucking did! So open the **_goddamn_ **door! _Open the door!"_

"I can't," he said, softly.

"Open the door!"

"We can't—"

Slamming her palms into it again, Rue screamed furiously at the pair behind her suffering. "Open the door!" Inhale. "Open the door!" Exhale. "Open the door!" Shoulders rising, heaving. _"Open the door!"_ Rue's voice teetered off during the end, shattered and hoarse, the tears met her on the final demand as she realized it wasn't a demand at all—a plea, a weak and broken request. 

Even Reid's snarls had tapered off into knotted growls. "Open the doors... _please."_

It started in her stomach and sprawled from her chest; an explosive burst of rage and pain, drawing from her throat in a sodden sob, a splintered whine that croaked throughout the stilled air. "You did this to me!" Rue cried out. "You fucking did this to me... Fez." Tears obstructed her vision, stuffed up her nose, and thickened the saliva pooling in her mouth, altering her voice into a thin and sharp bark. "You fucking ruined my life... The least you could do is _open the goddamn door and fix it!"_

No voice met her, nor the sound of a door opening on her and granting relief. Reid squeaked into a snarl that broke into an animalistic cry, his teeth trying to pierce through the pinholes of the screen like a caged dog begging for release. 

Rolling her shoulders, she stiffened up and crashed a palm into it. "I'm fucking serious, I'm so fucking serious if you don't open this door right now I swear to God..." she said, teeth clicking as she snapped out a nose-wrinkled, tear-ridden bark. "I will hate you till the day I fucking die."

"You'll wish you fixed this," Reid barked—Rue would remember his words vividly in the years to come, not because he begged for drugs, but because he never asked for them; he only wanted a solution to a problem. "Bindy, I swear to God I'll follow you to the deepest pits of Hell that you'll be residing in. I'll follow you and make your afterlife so fucking miserable, you hear me?"

A faint noise echoed, a soft apology from the wind that blew through her hair, she figured—only seconds before she beat her forearms and the sides of her fists into the screen door so viciously. Bellowing out a broken glass scream. "You fucking! Did this! To me!" A slam of her fists into the material punctuated each shout-soaked sob before she spun, slowly circling herself before pressing her hands against it, rattling it desperately. 

"You did this to me..." Another slam of her fists and a softened cry. _"Open the fucking door..."_

Rue assumed he must've left, he had to have, she felt nothing but hollow and burned from the inside out and Reid's presence wasn't comforting as much as he was a stick to her dying fire. "Fez, open the door," she begged, "Please, open the fucking door."

When no response came, she crashed both fists and felt herself splinter to pieces. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments certainly encourage more frequent updates, so if you enjoyed this chapter, I'd love if you let me know! :D


	8. Euphoria Funfair

She _tried,_ she did, but it was so hard to collect the pieces of herself when half of her mind was tugging at the very edge of their tether as a fat bee. Rue couldn't even orderly remember calling Ali until she had already slummed her way into the Waffle House, it only trickled back into her brain like a thick syrup, and she felt her heart sporadically jumping to _Forever Young_ while trying to work out whether or not she could up and ditch this reality she strung herself into.

That, she found, would be damn near impossible under the darkened eyes of Ali's daemon—a golden-feathered barn owl named Malak—who cautiously watched as Reid slithered onto the table as a chubby-legged gecko, tongue tentatively licking at the syrup surrounding her pancakes. Silverware clicked against Ali's plate as he nonchalantly ate his meal, utterly uninterested in her, or why she called; the two had barely shared a word. 

She pressed her back into the booth and pulled her knees up under her chin, feeling a little too confused and far too sober to be getting into any nitty-gritty emotional shit that always arises when around him, but guilt and fear nestled in her stomach, and the thought of leaving to wallow with Reid, only Reid, sounded somehow more miserable than this was uncomfortable. Reid was a real fucking pain when he wallowed. After a minute, she looked at him and blinked: she needed something to distract Ali from perceiving anything that was obviously conceivably _wrong_ about this situation. 

Chatter. Rue was beyond glorious at stupid, meaningless chatter.

"There's nothing I'm really passionate about. You know, like, I'm not dying to say or do anything, really. And every time I admit that to people, they're like, "Oh, my gosh, that's so sad." But..." she said, pressing her tongue to the inside of her inner cheek. "I think that's the case for most people. You know? Like, when I look at my mom or... like, the kids at my school... like, their profiles or their posts and their Tumblr rants... you realize they're all just fucked up, too... and lost." Rue lifted a hand to lay it flat on the table. Reid scampered over and sniffed her indignantly before turning into a possum and sitting beside her in the booth. "They just have a reason to mask it... whether it be, like, their-their families or their boyfriends or their _hashtag_ activism." With a final roll of a hand, she said, "And they're just reaching for something to make it all seem meaningful."

Ali scoffed, Malak clicked her beak. "Rue..."

"But sometimes I just sit and think..."

"Rue."

Tiny, pink possum hands tugged at her jacket. Reid's nose twitched. "Rue!"

"...like what's the point?"

With his index finger's knuckle, Ali brushed his nose nonchalantly. "Rue, I don't give a shit. Why'd you call me?" he didn't take her lightly mumbled _I didn't have anybody else to call_ before Malak walked sideways to lean in and chirp something into his ear. He looked her over indiscreetly, lifted his chin much like his owl daemon did when examining Reid on the other side of the booth. "Well, what happened to make you call?"

Rue swallowed hard, tasting bile and all the events that led her up until this point in her life that was so dogged and fucking pathetic, so miserably stupid in every sense of the revolting word. Kissing Jules, doing... what she did to Fez, saying what she did to Fez... "Just, you know..." she shrugged. "...the usual bullshit."

Malak made a noise in her throat, "Drug addicts don't just go about reaching out to each other—and certainly none like Rue—unless there's no options," she was speaking to Reid, head tilted curiously but her tone stern. "If she wanted to fuck off then she'd already have left so that means she wants something and she's purposely wasting our time by playing absentminded, which leaves _you,_ you tell us what happened." 

Some of her wanted to be offended, and her expression certainly twisted into that, but it was only half-honest because she really didn't want to say a damned thing about what transpired earlier today, and the rest of her was lingering on how Malak decided to surge for Reid as though he was supposed to clue them in.

"It's extremely stupid," Reid said sagely, sitting dog-like beside her, numb. "It's also not my job to speak for her? Rue, let's just leave, this was stupid, I told you this was a stupid idea, you never listen to me."

"A job?" Malak, aghast, stretched tall and ruffled her feathers. "Of course it isn't your _job_ to speak for her, it is a daemon's innate obligation to do for their human what they cannot or won't do themself, just as much as it's a human's innate obligation to keep themself physically well off for their daemon." After a pause, she looked to Ali with a fringe of fur prodding out around her beak, she nudged him with a wing before making another noise. "You're _one_ soul in two bodies, d'you see how ludicrous it is to call basic care a job?"

Huffing loud, Rue leaned forward just to shove herself against the booth again, peering out the nearby window as wet asphalt was set aglow in various neon hues. "Shit, fine, just don't get into any philosophical bull," she snorted, irritated. "Um... I was with my best friend. Okay, well, she's... I mean," Rue winced, cussing herself under a sharp, blew out wheeze as she processed how she was babbling like a fucking child. "She's a new friend, but we hang out every day. And, um... It's stupid. Reid was right, it's stupid." Rue tried to explain, concise and clear but it was all falling out pathetically wrong. For a moment, she wondered if somehow her brain cells had transferred through the air and snuck into Fezco's head just to spite her for her comment. "I just... I misread... the whole situation. And now it's gonna be really, really, _really..._ **_really_** fucking awkward. And I guess that hanging out with her was..."

The words were lost and she was sagging into her knees, wishing to melt into a stupid, soggy puddle of what was formally known Rue Bennett and turn rancid.

"I think," Reid whispered, voice thin. "It was the best thing that's happened to us in a while..."

Rue blinked, she tilted her head and looked at him. It'd been so long since she heard him say _us_ in reference to _them,_ together. It felt wrong and it hurt that it didn't feel good as she remembered it once feeling, hidden beyond the clustered haze of drugs and stupidity. It was stale. Yet she knew one thing: if he said it, she was thinking it. 

Promptly, Ali said, "Does the way in which you feel about her remind you of anything?"

"What d'you mean?"

"You know, like..." he rolled his hand in the air. "...the obsession, the feelings—"

Malak chirped bluntly, "The withdrawal."

In a blink, Reid was a sugar glider scaling her arm to perch on her shoulder. "What, like drugs?" He was shocked, horrified. Rue felt it.

Rue blinked then swallowed hard. Did she _feel_ it?

"But this is a good thing," she said, tapping the table with her palm like a businessman trying to sound confident enough to seal the deal. "Jules is Jules not like... drugs, she's not like drugs. Jules is good, she's good... this is a good thing." Was she trying to convince him or herself?

Her gut lurched when he leaned back, crossing his arms loosely over his chest. "Didn't drugs feel real good the first time you tried 'em?"

_Fuck._

* * *

The carnival was loud. Rolling, bright, colorful lights daubed the darkened world around them and left it glowing as wildly as the wet asphalt did outside of the diner. Rue was a right collection of unorganized clothes that she knew Celeste would've feigned offense at, even the makeup she managed to find interesting enough to go through the trials of applying—with help from Reid as a raccoon that held the brushes and repeatedly squeaked _the right eye looks glitter-ier_ —was too dark and already smudged. Along the way, she figured that it would've blown to attend the carnival alone after planning so much with Jules, and that would explain why Rue decided to call Lexi, knowing confidently that the brunette would tag along. It was fine, they were fine.

Fine until her eyes met with those of a particular pink-haired girl standing bright-eyed and wide-mouthed, smile stretched from cheek to cheek as, for a moment, it seemed like the music blaring around them had fallen on deaf ears. Reid stood at her side as a particularly wiry coyote that let out stifled, excite yips when a caracal bounded into view, ears twitching, eyes glistening as the lights struck. 

Rue swallowed, felt her lips twitch at the corners for a smile that was determined to remain suppressed. Reid stiffened, his tail wagged.

Common sense then flew out the window when Jules excitedly ran around small, clustered groups of people with Celeste leaping after. It took ten seconds collectively, she knew, before a body made impact with hers and arms were thrown around her neck, tugging her clumsily into a hug that Rue followed from the momentum alone. Spinning like punch-drunk idiots, they hardly eased each other's motions or became proper with their noises of delight.

At their sides, Reid and Celeste were a whuffing, purring, circling replica of all that whirled between her and Jules. 

"Hey," Reid said.

Brushing her cheek against his face, Celeste purred, "Hi,"

"I missed you," Jules said into Rue's hair as she finally situated her head, and their spinning slowly stopped.

"I missed you too," Rue said without compunction. It felt right. Out of all the things that seemed to feel wrong, this felt so undeniably right as if in spite, and Rue rested her chin on Jules' shoulder, inhaling her strawberry-fruity-fucking-something perfume. More than happy with the knowledge that she would smell like her to some extent once they were through with this painfully public display that Rue only thought twice about once she felt Jules' arms around her again. 

After a stiffening beat filled with noises from both the daemons beside them and those behind them, Jules blurted, "Are you mad at me?"

The mere question knocked all the wind out of Rue's lungs, "No," she said, resolute. "No... no." Reid made a yipping noise as he flopped to his side and Celeste teasingly took his ear in her mouth to tug at. "Are you mad at me?"

"No." And her voice almost sounded surprised that the question was asked in return, but wasn't it more understandable coming from Rue when Jules hadn't done more than be an innocent bystander that Rue read terrifyingly wrong, and she was dead certain that—after having this nonchalant forgiveness—she wouldn't initiate even something as little as a kiss, not without asking. Coming to think about it, she wouldn't use permission as permission enough; hell, she was now certain that she wouldn't even reciprocate if Jules' lips were on hers right now.

"Okay,"

Rue contemplated something in the silence before she inhaled, exhaled, and felt her fingers threaded through the loose drapes of Jules' hair. "Can we just pretend like what I did wasn't super weird?"

From her voice alone, Rue knew that Jules was smiling this into normalization like only she could, and there was little more Rue wanted than to melt right then "It wasn't weird. It—"

"It was weird, but..." Tightly, her fingers interlocked and she twiddled with the rings on the right hand as if to pacify herself for another moment. "...we don't have to talk about it.

It was a bizarre feeling when Jules pulled back, smiling all toothy-like and bright, almost like whiplash; how easily she could skip over such big things and their coattail emotions and Rue almost admired it if she didn't envy it first. Pills and booze had always been her way of doing that, it never came naturally, she always felt too much and for too long. "Talk about what?

Masquerading composure, she loosely smiled, shrugged just barely. "Nothing,"

"Right," was thrust through grinning lips as Jules clung to Rue's arm and they stared down the endless booths and attractions like they were on some sole survivors shit, about to enter a chaotic, yawning field full of some fuck _shit_ that was certain to make them whirl.

After Gia bid them a casual goodbye, something along those lines happened. Somewhat.

* * *

Like a quartet of night bandits, they rushed through the tight spaces between booths, their hearts racing and breaths getting shallow after each exhale. Rue shivered at the dead-cold eyes of Cal Jacobs and the wild mug his Anatolian Shepherd daemon directed at her and Reid when they were spotted like deer in the headlight. 

Only behind Reid, Celeste was leaping after until they emerged in another open strip of the carnival where more than enough groups could shroud them. "Why the fuck did you let us do that?" she said, panting, head swinging low as she tried to meet Reid's bouncing gaze. 

"I didn't let you do that!" Reid yelped, his coyote paws tip-tapping in the sandy gravel. "You just fucking... You both just did it. You both went over there and you did it!"

Jules outstretched a hand to spin Rue around, promptly facing her now as her own chest heaved and her hair was wild. "Did you see that his hands were _fucking_ shaking?"

It was stupid and insane and so wonderfully exhilarating all at once. Her stomach was coiling and releasing like it was using its own contents as a stress ball, running like, it was mystifying how fun and shocking it was. "Yes, and then he dropped..." Oh, her brain still couldn't wrap around that and all its implications.

"And then he fucking dropped the chili!" Frantically, Jules shook her, laughing with her face flushed a deep red. "Oh, my God."

"The chili! He dropped the fucking chili, and then he..." Rue wheezed out a stunned laugh. "And then you looked at me."

Shaking her head and dancing on her paws, Celeste made a cat-y noise unlike any she'd ever heard. "Yeah, because we were screaming inside." None of them ever noticed that she spoke to Rue instead of Reid. It was weird, Rue would later account, years from now how easily it happened and she'd always wonder if that meant something or if it was a warning for how easily _something_ this Vaughn duo had was given. 

"Yeah, well, that made him fucking look at me," Rue replied to the caracal dancing jittery around the thin coyote. "He looked at me in the fucking eyes, oh my god." And then they were off again, slowly this time, slinking up this strip, cackling hushedly with each other and it was the strangest accumulation of being high without the pills that Rue had ever felt.

Happy. Was it happy? Amidst all this, was it happy? It'd been so long since she was happy.

If that was true, it didn't last long.

* * *

In the slightly panicked hustle, Reid became a sharp-eyed hawk coasting above her and Celeste was high-stepping with her nose tilted to the sky as they searched for Adoni and Gia among a crowd of hundreds and the daemons to match. 

"She's just going straight to voicemail," Rue bit out, head throbbing. "Shit, I have to get her home in thirty minutes. How the fuck am I going to find her with that?" Overhead, she watched Reid flap his wings then tilt his head down to give her a firm sign that no, no he hadn't seen her. 

Jules trailed after, shouting her name again and again. "I mean, they can't be too far," she said. "We weren't away from them for long..."

Frustration was building a serious knot in her gut and if she wasn't so petrified, she might've just hurled. Reid flew down and became a blackbird to perch on her shoulder so that his talons didn't cut into her skin. "It'd be faster if we split up,"

Without hesitation, both caracal daemon and girl chirped in with: "Okay," they said. "Okay?"

"Just text me?"

"Okay," Jules said, looking around before turning and going the opposite direction that Rue was slinging herself. 

"Thank you," she told the bobbing backpack in the distance.

* * *

Reid had spotted a trotting terrier daemon following after one of the few friends of Gia's that Rue ever had the time to remember. Emma. Who, coincidentally, probably wouldn't recall their interaction strongly as she stunk of weed and booze. Rue's stomach dropped when she realized that the scent they were following after a miserable set of clue-ins from Emma was going to belong to Gia.

They were right.

In some backend shithole behind a ride was a moronic set of teens smoking and drinking—clinking bottles were capped and thrown into the back of the car when Rue approached and Reid became a bristling, growling coyote before Adoni fell off Gia's shoulders as a porcupine and smacked the ground as a giggling huddle of ferrety whiskers and fur. Writhing on the ground so evidently stoned that Gia didn't even try to lie when asked if they were. 

"I'm having the best time," Gia casually protested and then Adoni became a hare on the ground with all too-long legs and a weird, rust-colored pelt that wasn't typical on any hare she'd seen. He kicked once at Reid before going to leap into Gia's lap but was promptly jerked back by sharp canines secured around his cottontail. 

Rue pressed in, grabbing for the crook fo Gia's arm. "Gia, get the fuck up and let's go. I'm not playing with you."

At the kid's side, Troy, she figured, was his snickering, dark fox daemon who turned her nose to Reid and bit out a half-bark half-growl. "Wow. What'd your girl do? Decide to just clean up, and, like, go _I wanna become a mom?"_ She snickered again, baring her teeth in the slyest expression of an animalistic dare. Reid went rigid. It wasn't uncommon for daemons to settle disagreements or fights physically for their humans, and something was building that said he'd lunge for the snide, fluffy-tailed bastard but he wasn't—and Rue was relearning that if he wasn't, then she wasn't thinking about jumping down the kid's throat. 

When Gia yanked her arm back and left Rue resizing this approach, she mumbled something disdainful before saying, "Gia, get the fuck up. Let's go, _**now."**_

Adoni wiggled from Reid's jaws and met the ground again, becoming a fox himself that bared bright teeth. 

"Mom," Gia mocked, drawling. "What's your problem, _Mom?"_

When Reid lurched for Adoni, taking him by his scruff in a way that was too unnatural for a not-kit to be, she assumed that the kicking at her ribcage was fury and hurt and something twisted around her heart at how meaningless yet cruel that last word was said and pitifully stupid she felt. Adoni yelped. One of the other two foxes growled, another daemon laughed its stoned head off. 

The other little bastard, Roy, leaned into his twin's space. "Hey, if she's a mom, you know she a MILF."

This time, Rue went rigid herself and took Gia by the arm and hauled her up with little to no fighting as Adoni twisted helplessly in Reid's jaws. 

"Yo," said Troy. "For real, when'd you become such a bitch?"

Rue's eyes snapped his eyes, lips thinned to a line. Adoni was dropped and the dark fox echoing a wheeze-laugh was met with a tan muzzle and white canines. 

"Excuse me?" It came out like her Mom's follow-ups always did. Rue hated that, deep down. It was sharp and bitter, allowing room for a make up rephrase but too strangled for any rephrase to do more than irk her significantly. Gia eased back down, Adoni leapt into her lap.

"Was it after you fuckin' OD'd?" Troy barked and his daemon with him.

It was that sharp, cruel remark that she only blinked at and Gia slowly stood up because of, Adoni becoming a small owl that perched on her shoulder and shuddered again her cheek. "Let's go," Rue ordered her without ordering her, and Reid snarled once before leaving the _boys_ and their daemons to chitter and snicker amongst themselves. 

In the distance, she heard one last remark before they left the clearing and emerged back onto a strip for the carnival. 

"Just hope you don't get addicted again." Troy had shouted, then redirected that shout at Gia. "All I'm saying is, if I were you, I wouldn't be taking advice from her."

Things weren't normal or wrong after that, but they weren't right either, and somehow it was almost fine.

* * *

Kissing Jules Vaughn was both a bandage over her own night and a curious test to see if it could be soft where their first had been fast and crass, and Jules needed soft it seemed, huddled all up against Rue in her bed—and the content purring and whuffing from their daemons as the kiss became a gentle exchange of something wordless and infinite and endlessly rotating. It was right in every sense of the word.

If only _right_ could apply to what came after. 


	9. Epistolary — September, 2019

> **September 1st** — _I am sober today and while I've recently come into the realization that I have a **lot** of senses that were defunct from long term and consistent drug use I've also come into the realization that I may finally be reaching that true sexual awakening that most people reach either embarassingly early or according to their biological, animal-clocks or whatever._
> 
> **September 2nd —** _I am sober. Today me and Gia and Mom watched a reallyreallyreally stupid movie that my Mom watched (Flatliners, I think?) but Reid keeps telling me it felt like more than that. I believe him, I think. I don't think she was expecting us to be here to watch really stupid movies with her and Ossian, at least in a way that like... involved not being forced to in a hospital or dull summaries through letters at rehab. Thanks, Mom. For waiting._
> 
> **September 3rd —** _I think me and Jules are in a relationship? Reid is as spineless as an eclair left in the fucking sun and won't confirm it with Celeste. ps- i'm sober by the way._
> 
> **September 4th —** _Am I delicate? What does it mean to be delicate? I'm like ninety-nine percent sure nothing delicate is thought of as strong. I gues that fits? I dunno, I've never felt strong either? I don't wanna be delicate. Can someone delicate throw back a bottle of vodka and still not die? ps-_ _i'm sober and to the scrawny teenager/young adult that might be forced to research these entries in a couple hundred years after history geeks uncovered them for research, and now has to use them for historical homework or some shit: throwing back a bottle of vodka is bad, don't do that. or do, just remember i'm most likely cooler than you and thus, not a lightweight._
> 
> **September 5th —** _Today I am sober for Jules because I want to be good for her, she deserves good. I can't hold her back._
> 
> **September 6th —** _Today I am sober for Reid, I think. his coat isn't dull anymore, I don't want to hold him back._
> 
> **September 7th —** _If I'm sober for Reid, am I technically sober for myself? Is this self-care? Fuck if I know bro._
> 
> **September 8th —** _Today I'm sober but that's utterly irrevelant. We're in a relationship. Holy fuckfuckfuck bro. I don't think I've ever actually been in one? At least like... a real one that didn't dissolve after a month or the dude got his dick in... or like... well, whatever Lexi and I did that one time freshman year for like six months but that doesn't count I don't think? It doesn't matter, all I know is that me and Jules are taking it slow. "Slow as a slug on the earth that was salted behind you" - Reid._
> 
> **September 9th —** _Today I am sober because I watched some kids at this dance class in town and remembered enough moves to repeat them myself at home. The moves weren't distorted or lost in some druggy haze. I forgot how much I love dancing... how much I miss it. Reid was a peacock today. He hasn't been something so bright and colorful in years... I'm wondering what else I forgot. I wonder what I lost in my hazes and what I love but can't remember. I don't do this emotional, introspective bullshit but I wonder if I'll find them again. What else did I do before the drugs? What else do I love? I want to love all those lost things again._

* * *

**From: Ashtray**

**tattoo apt's @ 4, don't be fucking late i got more cstmers than u.**

**To: Ashtray**

**I paid you in advance, why d'you got to be a dick?**

**To: Ashtray**

**But yeah, we're coming.**

**To: Ashtray**

**Btw, do mouth tattoos hurt A LOT? Like? For real? 'Cause I dunno if Jules will go through with it if it hurts a lot, ya know?**

**From: Ashtray**

**do i look like a fucking therapist? this sounds like something u ask a fucking therapist and not the dude that's benefiting from your impulsive, manic ass decisions**

_**[ Rue is typing... ]** _

**To: Ashtray**

**Hey is Fez there?**

**From: Ashtray**

**nah and he ain't no therapist either**

**To: Ashtray**

**I'll pretend to be shocked.**

* * *

**From: Jules**

**1+ Image Attachment**

**exaggerated pouty faces are entirely impossible in profile pictures now**

**To: Jules**

**What are you talking about? It obviously says pouty faces 'rule'.**

**From: Jules**

**celeste told me to tell reid to smack the back of your head**

**From: Jules**

**we know he reads the texts!**

**To: Jules**

**Fuck u**

* * *

> **September 17th —** _I'm miracously sober and things are going... good. I know on some innate level that I should feel bad about this because I know something is wrong... Jules and Celeste are acting weird. I dunno, ever since that night at the carnival something has just been wrong and me and Reid can't pin what it is and they won't talk about it or act like anything is wrong and I just... I dunno, if we want a good relationships... Ali said some shit about boundaries? He says a lot of scary, fucked up bullshit but I'm tryna act on that one tip and it just... I think it has something to do with Cal Jacobs. I can't explicitly state why considering that I promised and Reid says the legal ramificiations are enormous and also we promised... but I just KNOW it has something to do with him and maybe... I dunno, maybe Nate? Some weird fucked up shit happened with him and Maddy and I dunno... I think something is up. Fuck, that whole family is fucking weird like a whole suburban version of the hillbillies from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something. We'll figure it out._
> 
>  **September 18th —** _I missed your birthday, Dad, I didn't even know I did and I... it's the first time I've missed it. I don't know how I missed it. Happy Belated Birthday. You'd be forty-eight. I'm sober today and I'll say it's for you._
> 
> _I hope you'd be proud of me. I miss you._
> 
> * * *

**From: Jules**

**i'm sorry for walking out at lunch today but i'm serious. this is like... even if you guys decide you hate us one day. like, you can never tell anyone about _this._**

**To: Jules**

**Why would we ever hate you?**

**From: Jules**

**that isn't the point, seriously, this is some go-to-your-grave shit.**

**To: Jules**

**We promised already! So, do you think [insert generic white boy name] knows about this?**

**From: Jules**

**no? why would he know?**

**To: Jules**

**i dunno, you went up to the booth at the carnival, did he look like he knew?  
**

**From: Jules**

**no, like, literally, like we didn't even notice anything else let alone _anybody_ else**

**To: Jules**

**Well, he's scary. His whole fucking family is scary.**

_**[ Jules is typing... ]** _

**From: Jules**

**i really want to stop having this conversation now**

**To: Jules**

**No, no, it's cool! Like, you know what'd be amazing? If they paid you off with a bunch of money, and then we'd do a bunch of really cool shit.**

**From: Jules**

**rue, this isn't a joke**

**Message to Jules _[ unread ]_**

**I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything by it?**

* * *

**From: NA ASSHOLE**

**You can leave our conversations like a toddler with a tantrum but that doesn't mean I suddenly forgot what we were talking about. Okay? Think about it, kid. What happens when she moves away? Or when she decides she wants to just be friends?**

**To: NA ASSHOLE**

**You mean "if."**

**From: NA ASSHOLE**

**No, I mean "when."**

**To: NA ASSHOLE**

**Okay, I mean, I don't know but we talked about living together. Like, if she goes to school in New York, I'll just go with her.**

**To: NA ASSHOLE**

**I'll go anywhere she goes. We discussed that.**

**From: NA ASSHOLE**

**Are you ignoring your own goals in these discussions of yours? Just because she goes somewhere doesn't necessarily mean it's where you need to be.**

**To: NA ASSHOLE**

**Google Translates 90s parent phrase to English: "If your friend went and jumped off a bridge, would you?"**

**From: NA ASSHOLE**

**I think you're missing my point, Rue. Nothing in high school lasts forever.**

**From: NA ASSHOLE**

**Google Translates English to stubborn as shit teenager: "Which means you shouldn't base your life and future around someone else's."**

**To: NA ASSHOLE**

**You should meet her.**

* * *

**To: Lexi**

****Are you home?** **

**To: Lexi**

**I know we haven't been the greatest friends.  
**

**To: Lexi**

**But we're sorry and let us make it up to you guys.**

**From: Lexi**

**Whatcha got in mind?**

**From: Lexi**

**:D _\- pax_**

* * *

> **September 26th —** _Jules and Celeste are acting weird again but... I think it's the stuff I mentioned earlier. I'm still sober though, things are going good still. Reid likes taking the forms of various reptiles and peacocks. I dunno what else to say to be honest. I'm too busy wondering what's up with Jules. I hope it's not us._
> 
> **September 27th —** _Jules is so good I hope we're good enough for her. I'm sober today to be good for her._
> 
> **September 28th —** _I'm sober today. That's enough._
> 
> **September 29th —** _We're going roller skating with Lexi and Pax tonight, it's going to be good. I'm excited to fall on my ass and am one hundred percent ready to shot put Reid if he laughs. I'm sober today so I can remember tonight._

* * *

**To: Jules**

**We're waiting outside for you guys :p**

**To: Jules**

**Hey, you guys wanna stay the night at our place?**

**From: Jules**

**me and celeste should probably go home after this**

**To: Jules**

**Okay, is it cool if we come w/ you guys?**

_**[ Jules is typing... ]** _

**From: Jules**

**sure.**

* * *

> **September 30th —** _It's currently 1am and Jules and Celeste are asleep. They barely talked at all to us on the way home, they're so closed off and quiet... They're not acting right and fuckinghell I just wish I could fix it. They were with us when we were being shit, right? We should be able to help them. I'm sober but I dunno if that means anything at 1 am. I'm tired. Why do I feel alone? I've never felt alone with Jules... I don't want to feel like this... It makes my head spin and I need to fix it and I can't fix what's wrong with her so I keep thinking 'I need to fix the head spinning' but i can't fix that because I need to be sober. I need to be clean. I don't like this, why won't they just tell us what's wrong? What if I could help? Why won't they let us in?_
> 
> _Is this what my Mom felt like? God, I don't even know... This is worse, I just know it but I can't tell if that's my anxiety or my nerves._
> 
> _Reid's asleep beside me. I think that's good. He used to sleep at the bottom of my bed and now he's sleeping beside me... I should feel good about this. I don't. I don't understand. Trying to be good is hard. I wish I was just good. Even when shes acting weird as hell, Jules is still good._

* * *

**From: Lexi**

**1+ Image Attachment**

**We had the best time with you guys! Pax loved hanging out with Reid and Celeste.**

**From: Lexi**

**I missed hanging out with you too! It's been so long since we just like... hung out.**

**To: Lexi**

**Is that a dog pic covered in heart emojis? Cute.**

**To: Lexi**

**I missed you too, it was fun seeing you guys. Pax's voice is deep as fuck when I'm not high.**

_**[ Lexi is typing... ]** _

**To: Lexi**

***Missed hanging out with you.**

**From: Lexi**

**Well. Thank u for inviting us, maybe we can do it again?**

**To: Lexi**

**We'll set something up I'm sure, that sounds good. I gotta go, early class tomorrow. Good night.**

**From: Lexi**

**Goodnight!**


	10. Kamikaze Blonde

Rue understood that things weren't okay. 

Jules was becoming both reticent and erratic, silent and then talkative, warm and then cold. A pendulum of contradicting emotions that were sprouting from something bigger, she knew, she could see it. No matter the vague reassurances that were thrown her way, she understood that there was a stiff air that had formed between them, a metaphorical wall that began to feel a lot less metaphorical as the days waned on. But, goddamit, she couldn't even pry and question because a nagging thought in her mind recalled all the times she had simply lied _well_ when questioned, peppering in enough embarrassing shit that made the shtick believable. "It has to be because of Cal Jacobs," she told Reid one night, pouring a bowl of cereal for herself as the clock struck three in the morning, needing to leave to escape the house and the sticky, agitated feeling that clung to her skin and beneath it. "Shit, Reid, it can't be anything else... can it? I mean, you saw the way he acted when he saw her."

"He dropped the chili," he said simply, a coyote sitting lopsided in a chair at the table, facing her with a tilted head and locked gaze. "Celeste won't tell me anything either."

"What if it's us?" she said, the spoon clinked against the glass bowl as she dropped it at the revelation and he twitched. 

Reid considered this before shaking his head. "No," he answered. "We're clean, we're good now... why would it be us? I don't know if it's Cal though, he's the "slide dirty money under the table to make you quiet and moderately rich" type of creep, but I dunno who else could make them act like this."

As the weeks folded on, their situation didn't get better but she was selfishly absorbing the falsified reality that came with Jules pretending to be fine, because in this falsified reality she could pretend, too; that this wasn't terrifying, that she didn't feel excluded from a relationship with herself, that her love was unconditionally reciprocated, but the facade was little less than accepting come Halloween night.

It was impossible to ignore that everything wasn't fine.

* * *

Clad in a Romeo-esque outfit with Reid—as a coyote—sporting a fanciful collar-secured bowtie and cuff set to match as they waited outside of Jules' house and were met with the door being pulled open and a waft of booze-soaked air smacking them in tandem. Rue was distantly aware of the secondhand familiar burn of vodka in her throat as Jules emerged, done to the nines in an all-white outfit, a rendition of a Juliet costume from a movie they'd hardly paid attention to but found the aesthetics of to be fascinating, angel wings flat against her shoulder blades, her smile loose and crooked as her eyes were vaguely watery. Jules was drunk, if she didn't highlight with the way she blankly stared at Rue, it was the way Celeste clumsily staggered past Reid without so much as a purr, instead, she offered a short glance at her lace-like necklace before lumbering in a short circle. 

Rue swallowed hard and pertly smiled. Lost for words with the way the moonlight set the ocean in Jules' eyes for a glimpse and how that blue-ish lighting perfectly set her costume aglow. "Wow," she let out a chuckle that was more air than genuine noise. "Um... You... You look... fucking _amazing."_

"Thank you," Jules said with her voice as distant as she physically felt.

Celeste had said, "We don't really feel it, but... you know."

Again, Rue smiled as though enough trying could make this situation better and, goaded by the short thought of the time Jules had said kissing those two times Rue had grounded her "six feet under" with something "bubbly" and that was Rue's intention now, to drag her friend/girlfriend/something back to earth. Rue leaned forward, hands neatly clasped like this was a date on a romcom, and her lips melt the air in a soft release as Jules skirted her with a hand up. 

Reid looked up at her as the girl and the daemon reached the sidewalk, hardly waiting for them as they amble ever so slowly.

During her childhood, Rue had always suffered the unfortunate trait of lacking emotional foresight; now that could be attributed to being a child but she knew it simply as obsessing over the mere fact of feeling good until she had absorbed it as a continual reality. Which, in short, meant that if she felt good, she knew at her core that it'd last forever. 

But it never did.

"You smell like alcohol," Rue said as she and Reid half-jogged to catch up to them. It was more of a verbal observation than it was anything else, it simply just felt weird seeing Jules be... well, bordering drunk. The only other time she'd seen her drink was at McKay's party, and something deep in her gut said that this night wasn't going to end as well as that night had. 

"Uh... I mean," she shrugged. "It's Halloween, right?"

"Right," Rue blew out a breath. Reid made a noise and pressed against her leg. "Yeah."

* * *

There was word that Daniel was throwing the party and, by default of this, it was easy to walk and slowly collect the rest of their miserably ragtag group of soon-to-be partygoers, and the next stop was Kat's house, who left as a "slutty nun" with her daemon—a deep-red Maine Coon named Soliloquy—snug around her shoulders like a glorified neck pillow. 

"Wow," Reid told Soliloquy. "Kat looks fuckin' cool."

With a rolling head, Celeste and Jules echoed this resounding _"wow"_ as they fell apart to allow room for Kat to slip into the ranks. 

"It's, like, whatever," answered Kat, putting on a stoic, nonchalant expression that Soliloquy's flicking tail compromised. _Agitated_ that tail said. "I think I'm gonna get really fucked up tonight."

Bumping their arms together briefly, Jules gave a lazy grin before nodding. _"Mhm,_ same." With the bottle in hand that she had made them return to her house to retrieve, she took another swig of the clear liquid then wordlessly offered it up. Kat took it and took a decent swig herself before handing it back.

"Tequila makes me aggressive," That last word came out like a satisfied purr that Soliloquy echoed in his chest, and Rue and Reid flocked together as if for reassurance in the silently buzzing air which bubbled between the six of them. 

Celeste giggled first, twirling on her paws as her necklace dangled before she cozied up to Reid with a deep noise rattling in her throat as she brushed his face. Then Jules twirled with the bottle to her lips. "Tequila makes me wanna dance," For the first time since the start of her official sobriety, Rue felt entirely out on the moment in spite of being right within it as it transpired. The others were mingling, sharing the bottle back and forth as they walked ahead, something in her heart thumped as she realized that she wasn't at all involved; social graces only ever came to her when she drank, the ease at having socialization only came when she was half buzzed, and she truly didn't know what to do if her absence made this night somehow awful for Jules, she didn't want there to be pressure to include her. 

Falling on her skill of chattering nonsense, she felt Reid cringe beside her as she choked out a quiet noise and then, "I, uh, I once took, like, ten Vicodin, and drank an entire thing of tequila, and then, I, like..." she drawled under the view of Kat and Jules' head canted back at her. "...blacked out for three days. But while I was blacked out, I, like, still went to school and did homework and shit." They weren't laughing or goading her on as others had in the past and she wanted to cave in on herself as she realized how god awful that sounded; she ground out a nonchalant thinning of her lips instead. "It was really weird."

Soliloquy chirped, "Well, let's not do that tonight."

"Uh," Rue shook her head as Reid barked a sharp "no!" and she simmered back into herself with a faint chuckle tacking the end of each word. "I won't. I'm... I'm clean, so we're good." 

"Wait a minute," After another loud swig of the bottle, Jules swayed her way backward and hooked an arm over Rue's shoulders. "I was supposed to be _your_ chaperone," she said and pressed her forehead to the side of Rue's. "But now I'm drunk."

The word chaperone reminded her of middle school dances and toddlers in museums. Heat flushed into her cheeks as her eyebrows furrowed. A child, was that how Jules saw her? An incompetent child that'd go and guzzle a bottle and pop a few pills if a pseudo-parent wasn't eagle-eye watching her? She couldn't tell whether or not she was embarrassed or frustrated that even after all her effort... she was still somehow less even in a vague sense. "I don't actually... like, need a chaperone, you know?"

With a half-purr half-hiss, Celeste went, "Oops,"

After an uncomfortable shift as Jules slipped from her to take another swig, Rue needed to not feel so alone in this plain mediocrity that was attending a party with the explicit intention of not drinking, she needed to not feel adrift and there was only one person she knew wouldn't be drinking tonight and her heart hammered twice at the solace-ridden thought. "Um," she said. "Where's Lexi?"

One of the tequila-drunk daemons giggled before Kat simply told her, "She's kind of hard to miss."

* * *

"I'm sure Romeo would be a lot older than fifty by now," Rue teased as Lexi and Pax left the house—her in an uncannily authentic Bob Ross costume, and Pax in a purple-black witch hat—and there was a moment of hesitance before Lexi sighed out. Then came Cassie and, despite her attire, seemed almost insecure about the costume and herself as she stepped out with her daemon—an arctic fox named Kalon, who happened to be wearing a red tie—she eyed the collective group.

Then she raised a shoulder as if to accentuate an asset they weren't paying attention to. "Is it too much?"

"No," Rue said.

Jules loudly agreed, "No, it's not."

With a nod and an air that seemed to have come with a burst in confidence, she nodded and entered their ranks. "Good,"

As they carried on to the party, Rue had tirelessly tried to goad Jules into a one-on-one conversation but each attempt ended in a subtle let down in favor of downing another swig or another conversation with the others, and it was then that she truly accepted that things aren't right but she was too afraid to ask why because she feared the answer may be worse than the knotted feeling snagged inside her gut.

* * *

Once they hit the party, Cassie, Kat, and even Jules had each managed to find themselves lost in the thrill that the cloistered rooms and sweating bodies cocktailed with booze and blaring music that made Rue feel sick as she both wanted and loathed the taste of vodka and beer in the air. At the island in the kitchen, Jules had downed another cup of _something_ and Celeste silently watched from a chair at her side. 

A presence drifted to her side and Lexi tilted her head, then looked out to the island. "Are they okay?" Pax said, sidling up beside Reid.

"I don't know," Reid answered.

"Does she normally drink?" Lexi said next, genuine concern wrought in her voice. 

Rue almost lied but found it to be contradictory to her hellbent need to be good. "No," she said. "It's fine though... it's fine, it's Halloween. You know, I'm not a drag... just 'cause I don't drink now doesn't mean I expect everyone to be sober around me." But, goddamit, was she so relieved that Lexi was right now. A solitary, wig-wearing buoy in the expansive ocean that was this fuckening of a party.

After a minute of absorbing this, Lexi looked at her with a sympathetic expression that was almost concealed by the bear. "This must be weird," she breathed as Pax huddled close to her legs, avoiding the bodies and daemons bigger than him, and Reid mimicked this as he didn't quite want to abandon his costume yet in favor of a new and manageable form. Rue blinked, a nonverbal _"what?"_ that the other girl clued in on. "Like, being a teenager, but not really being able to do teenager stuff."

"It's fine for us," Paxton reiterated. "But we've never been the types to... well, do such vibrant teenager stuff. You guys though..."

Rue let that hammer home and swallowed it bravely. "Yeah, well, when we're adults..." she let an air of nonchalance fall over her. "Reid and I won't be able to do adult things, either, so... it's not like a big deal, ya' know?" Something twisted inside her throat when she noticed the other girl looking past her. "Lex?"

Mouth slightly agape, Lexi was dumbfounded as she spoke, "Is that Gia?"

At the name, in tandem, Rue and Reid turned around and she felt the twisting sensation in her throat go flat as it was replaced with a sizzling shock then stunning rage that was scarcely outmatched by the speakers vibrating the floor. "You gotta be fucking joking," it was Gia and it was Adoni, and she and Reid had crossed through the bodies and rode up on her and her currently fox-shaped daemon on her lap. 

Adoni squeaked in surprise. Gia said leaned back as though falling into the couch would save her from the clench-jawed rage boiling beneath Rue's surface. "What are you doing here?"

"What am I doing here?" Rue barked, teeth half-exposed as Reid's were bared at the boy's fox daemon. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

The boy's, probably Troy, daemon wheezed out a laugh. "Getting lit."

At her back, she felt Lexi and Pax crowd and somehow that goaded her into the next course of action she took. Reid plucked the scrawny red fox daemon up and she stood to her full height. "I'll deal with your ass later," she told Gia and pointed at Troy. "You. Get up."

"What?"

As the fox squirmed in Reid's grasp, Rue wasn't for these antics, she understood, and reached forward and hauled Troy up like a paperweight. "I said get the _fuck_ up."

* * *

Fingers curled around the boy's collar as she slammed him into the chair in the basement, and she eyed him like a coyote with a hare as he stared at her, eyes ringed-white with fear as he went to reach for his daemon and Reid dragged the daemon backward. They needed to set him straight. Somehow. They could most likely convince Gia against being so gaudy with this behavior but she wasn't dumb enough to believe that it'd be efficient if this fool of a boy kept weaving himself into her life in the worst ways possible, and with Lexi and Pax standing like a steadfast good cop in this theoretical interrogation—but entirely a confrontation—to combat her and Reid's bad cop, she knew the exact way to both get her desired result while pulling a decent gag that she so wildly needed. 

"Now let me just be real straight with you," she bent her back and leaned down, eye-to-eye as he twitched away. "You ever been to rehab, Roy?"

"No, I'm Troy," he stammered, forehead glistening with sweat. "I'm..."

"Roy, Troy. I don't give a _**fuck.**_ " Rue made sure to let a sharp noise accentuate that last word. "I _said_ have you ever been to rehab?"

"No..."

Nervous. He was nervous and that was exactly what she fucking needed, now she just needed to play this gag to a tee. Channeling every bad cop/detective she'd seen on late-night television, she cleared her throat, furrowed her brows and wrinkled her nose in a half-growl that matched Reid's in the background. Rue shared a glance at Lexi before nodding once, a subtle _play along_ that her friend followed loyally. 

Rue sniffed and rubbed her nose with a knuckle, Elliot Stabler-like, she knew. "Well, in rehab, there are some real fucked-up motherfuckers." she snapped, relishing halfway in how his eyes widened and his daemon went quiet in Reid's grasp. "We're talking people who are on the hook for armed robbery, attempted murder, real fucked-up shit. Hardcore motherfuckers."

Mustering all the convincing prowess she could, Lexi chimed with her soft, near too-kind voice that sounded laughable when she made it deep but now wasn't the time to laugh as Rue listened, "It's true. I went once. It was scary."

"You know what happens when you spend an extended amount of time in rehab? You tend to make friends with those hardcore motherfuckers." Her blood coursed hot on a distorted sort of adrenaline as she recalled the names from a television show and he ate up the names like each person was as authentic as she was convincing the poor fool they were. "So let me be very clear with you. If you so much as go past first base with my little sister, or try to get her high again, I will call Omar, I will call Marlo. I will call Avon, I will call Brother Mouzone, I will call fuckin' Bodie, and I will call fucking Stringer." His daemon whimpered and, always kinder than her, Reid let the puppy/fox/cub of a thing scrabble into his human's arms. But Rue still wasn't done and she continued with the utmost grit in her voice. "And I will have these motherfuckers standing outside of your front lawn. Do you hear me?"

Troy nodded, panicked. 

Lexi approached, coming up on his side to look down at him. Pax, nose-to-nose with the daemon, nodded confidently. "Or even Wee-bey."

Stifling a choking laugh, Rue nodded. "A hundred percent." she concurred and felt Reid ride up on her side. "Do you know what kind of people these are? These are the kind of people who will strip you fucking naked, and go to work on you with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch. Do you hear me?"

Always the ice to her fire, even as kids, the off-the-gag Lexi came through when Troy made a suffocating noise that sounded more childlike than the grown man he seemed to adore playing. "Rue, I think he understands."

"I don't think he does."

Lexi tapped his shoulder once. "Tell her you understand."

Instantly, with a strained voice, he answered. "I understand."

Falling back with Reid's nails clicking on the concrete floor, she stood and crossed her arms. "There you go. Now go in there..." she nodded toward the door with her head. "...And tell my little sister she looks nice."

In a clumsy mess of fear and shock, both Troy and his daemon scrambled for the steps and both Lexi and Rue and their daemons could only watch in composure for a moment before Rue chuckled, elbowed Lexi, and laughed as Lexi expelled all the air in her lungs at the relief and strangeness that arose between them. Good. Rue thought, she felt good. Here. With Lexi and this even stranger dynamic they seamlessly fell into like they did when they were kids interrogating others on the playground. It felt right. 

It was a shame things didn't stay that way that night.

* * *

They had found Fezco and Bindy at the pool and she missed how weirdly safe she felt when in his presence. Not the type that comes from believing he could like... fight someone for her or some shit, but the kind of safe that came from certainty and even in the negatives, he'd always been there, and after her blow up, he somehow still welcomed her back with a casual _"Hey, what's up, kid?"_ that she wanted to melt into by default of it being so familiar. 

"Uh, look," she told him. "I owe you an apology."

He shook his head. "Nah, come on, now," he reassured her. "We're good."

Rue wanted to believe that and leave this conversation in the dust, but as Reid went submissive under a lazily laying Bindy's stare, she knew that being good meant dealing with the sick shit she did. Ali parroted that like a fucking broken record. "Bro, man. I, um... I said some really fucked up shit I didn't mean."

"Listen, Rue. You a drug addict. I don't take nothin' a drug addict says personally. 'Cause I don't believe nothin' a drug addict say," he said it with such conviction that it almost sounded like he meant this more personally than hearing other broke as shit addicts hitting him up for another dose. Rue pondered that. _"I love you, I hate you. You the best. Go fuck yourself._ It's all the same shit. You know what I'm sayin'? Y'all just lookin' for a angle in."

Vividly recalling all that she had said and done, cringing into herself before nodding at his casual position in the chair, she eased a little at the fact that he wasn't going to echo how poorly she'd treated him. "Yeah, I know, but... As your friend, I need you to know that I'm sorry..." she thought for a moment before adding a hushed: "And I love you."

The corners of his lips tugged upward as a smile stretched his face. "I love you, too, kid."

"And thank you for not... selling me drugs."

"As your friend, I got you," and she wholeheartedly believed his drawled out statement. 

Floppy ears twitched as Bindy shifted to her side and asked, Reid, "You sober still?"

He nodded. "Yeah..."

Fezco waved a hand in the air to garner her attention, branching from their conversation that still continued on the ground. "Sober huh? And how's that?"

"You know, it's weird," she admitted, having needed to get these distorted thoughts out that only he seemed to absorb with zero judgment. "I've been fucked up so long that it kind of feels like a new drug.

With another drag from his blunt, he puffed and agreed. "I feel you,"

"Like... the highs are high. But the, uh..." The last couple weeks had felt like nothing but a roller coaster and she had become well adjusted to what came after her vibrant highs that'd become few and far between now. "The lows are low."

And that was a major understatement to the highest fucking degree.

* * *

Together, Rue and Reid had searched through the house for Jules and Celeste until they stumbled outside with vague guidance from Bindy as she and Fezco reentered the party swiftly. In the pool, in full costume, a kamikaze of a blonde and a paddling caracal were clumsily in sync as they swam in a tight circle mentally made. Reid barked his shock as he ran to meet Celeste but was promptly splashed by Jules, leaving him squeaking a miserable noise as his cuffs were dampened and he was flicked in the eye with chlorine pregnant water. 

"Although I joy in thee," Jules had recited as her face was a somber green/blue/turquoise and the water was a bright pink/purple I have no joy in this contract tonight. "I have no joy in this contract tonight."

Rue bent beside the pool after brushing her hand over Reid's ears, placed her forearms on her knees, and watched as the pair dove beneath the water and emerged, swam, and drawled so drunkenly that her own had spun. At her core, she also felt wildly uncomfortable... and stuffy... and embarrassed but rather for Jules than any ounce of remaining dignity she herself had left. "What are you talking about?" she said lowly, then looked back at the people sparsely clustered at the door. "I don't know what that means."

Celeste recited as she and Jules made eye contact, slowly drifting in a circle together. "It's too rash. Too unadvised. Too sudden."

"Too like the light in which thou doth cease to breathe." Jules recited, smiling so that her voice adopted its curvature, and Rue couldn't find it in herself to be fond when her heart twinged and her soul cringed away from the pool. 

Wrinkling her nose, exhaling, then composing herself, Rue brushed her hands over Reid's bristly fur to calm him and hoped she'd feel a little less anxious and agitated herself. "Jules, you're drunk, okay? And you sound like an idiot." As Jules did another lap, she spoke again, exasperated. "Can you please get out of the pool?"

"Ere one can say 'it lightens'. Sweet, good night!" Celeste told Reid as she swam by him, teasing his whiskers with a damp paw when he reached for her ear. "This bud of love by summer's ripening breath."

Moments before Jules dove back under the multi-colored water, she breathlessly said. "May prove a beauteous flower when we next meet."

All that Rue knew to do was to watch, a knot forming in her throat as her eyes stung from the tears that brimmed within them, threatening to take her breath as she exhaled, inhaled, swallowed, repeat. Attempting to find grounding in this... normalcy... an excuse for why Jules' words wrung her with worry rather than love or goodness or anything in between and, as she looked to her soul pressed to the ground, she thought of what Ali had said about Jules... how things were ever-changing and never the same... because she couldn't see past this soured feeling coiled around her innards to remember how things were before this night; because this didn't feel good.

As Jules emerged right beneath Rue, her desperation was evident as wet hands traveled up her chest and toyed with the sides of her jacket. "Stop, okay. Can you stop?" she begged in a hushed whisper, hating how pathetic she sounded, realizing she had no say in this. "Stop," she said again, firmer this time as those wet hands gripped each side of her jacket and she felt her heart lurch and she so desperately needed Jules out of the pool but she wanted to follow her gut and run. "Stop. S-Stop, stop. Jules—"

Before she could resist or pull away, she was dragged into the water with a yelp and a frantic, muffled noise from Reid as she watched his distorted image above the water. In brief glimpses, she felt like a passenger on a sickening ride as Jules pulled their lips together, too stunned to reject it. When they both emerged, Rue was a soaked mess that was silent as the water wasn't still, watching as Celeste and Jules laughed. 

Soggy with shame and embarrassment and resentment and all of the above, she pulled herself from the pool and abandoned the blonde and her daemon with Reid at her heels.

* * *

In the bathroom, as Rue fumbled with her collar, Reid coaxed her to sit on the toilet seat as he became a large breed of dog that pressed between her legs and allowed her to wrap her arms around his neck as she wheezed and choked on a sob that couldn't escape her throat. 

"Fuck," she choked out, gripping his fur as though it was a lifeline that she had nowhere else in this world. "Fuck, Reid, fuck."

"Breathe," he instructed her, laying his blocky head in the crook of her neck. Reciting what past therapists had told her to do in panic attacks. "Just breathe. Right, right... Uh, right, name something you can see,"

"Don't fucking... start this..." she croaked but felt a wave of shivers and a sharp tear in her throat and melted in submission as she looked around the bathroom then at Reid's fluffy tail that resembled a husky's rather than any guardian-breed of dog. "Your weird-ass breed... what the fuck... what _are_ you?"

In response, he whuffed, but she didn't let him go, and he didn't leave.

* * *

There was something warm in her heart when she was still lost and uttered idiotic words to Lexi that, with brazen sincerity, were rejected with reassuring _"you're not a burden"_ responses that made Rue want nothing more than to curl into her arms like she had done time and time again, and when Lexi offered to go home with her, she almost jumped on it... but this... this happened because Jules was drunk and drunk Jules needed help. Like, God, Rue couldn't forgive herself if she was hit by a car or drank herself into a watery grave by drowning with a tequila bottle in the pool. Loyally, Lexi stayed but Rue understood that it was for her and she welcomed that and didn't know how to respond as they tried to coerce Jules into leaving the party. 

It wasn't until Nate and Maddy walked in with their daemons bold and pressed close that Jules went reticent and easily folded for their requests to leave.

Rue looked to Reid as they watched Nate and his daemon strut through the party, and then the way Jules ducked her head and inched closer between her and Lexi as though either could shield her.

With a confirming snuff from Celeste as she cowered and slunk between Jules' legs, Rue had a hunch for what was wrong, and she was hellbent on figuring out the specifics, but she knew one thing for sure:

It had to do with Nate fucking Jacobs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: the new daemons have name meanings that relate back to their humans... have a good ol google of that!


	11. The Marvelous Misadventures of Howard and Bennett

The screen in front of her glowed brightly as Rue twitched at the edge of her bed. Reid was a dull stoat dramatically splayed above the blanket, his crooked whiskers drooping as he rolled onto his side. The opening for Love Island played for what felt like the fortieth time but the episode ticker technically indicated it was twenty-two since this landslide started two days prior; there was always something about reality TV that Rue unequivocally loved, how funny and unnecessarily dramatic it was, she could focus on it without enacting the use of more than half a singular brain cell and that was peak consumption in her eyes. Rue, when in search of entertainment, determined laying down one minute then blinking up the next to realize she had watched a whole season and a half of Love Island while yearning for more, as _quality._ Reid had considered that depressing but—when considering that he was doing the exact same thing, his opinion held little weight—but Rue didn't echo his thoughts, but she did believe it was a good way to measure depression.

Rue figured this because she and Reid were nearing the next season and watching the nonsensical bullshit take place on screen was beginning to feel like work, final season of Mad Men work, and that told her she was... probably depressed. 

Not moving from the same spot on her bed for twenty-four hours to go pee kind of depressed. 

"Maybe you should go," said Reid listlessly, whiskers twitching. "You'll get sick, that'll be awful,"

After a beat, she twisted under the blanket, sending Reid rolling off her body. He landed on his stomach with a squeak before shaking out his fur. "The thought of having to stand up, exert 172 muscles each step for 35 feet..." she murmured into her arm. "...just so I can sit on cold porcelain and piss out toxins over and over again for the rest of my life makes the whole concept of living feel like one long, sadistic joke." The way he nested under some of the excess blanket told her that he didn't agree but he was too caught in her own drag to be able to confidently rebuttal; if he did, she knew she'd have listened just to make him shut up. Yet neither of them moved from their stupor even as the next episode on the screen ticked, hauling them to the next season of this backlog they were going through. 

The most despicable part of depression was that she rarely knew she was depressed, making her unable to stop herself from getting any worse because if she didn't know that anything was wrong about this situation, that meant it was normal. This was normal.

Through this, however, she knew that she and Reid weren't the only ones feeling so fucking down. 

After the Halloween party, Jules and Celeste didn't come to school for a solid week... and even though she sent Jules over fifty texts, she didn't respond. Rue wasn't dumb, even when depressed, she wasn't dumb, and she racked her brain again and again over this because she knew something bad had happened—and it had something to do with Nate; it'd spread that Tyler Clarkson had been booked for assault, but this shit wasn't really fucking adding up, and she and Reid had begun putting together the pieces of the puzzle the week prior, and they weren't going to stop until they unfurled the truth of this _bull._

* * *

"Howard, let's roll," she said as she and Reid—as a rugged Belgian malinois—strode through the hall with Lexi and Pax at their heels until each trotted up at their sides with a little bit more self-imposed certainty. A voice over the intercom system spoke, filling the hall with a muffled statement that churned Rue's stomach the wrong way but somehow made her more electrified; her heart racing to match the speed her brain was churning at. 

_False accusations in today's world can cause serious long-term damage to one's career, reputation, and emotional well-being,_ the voice had said, briefly pausing as they entered their next class with a momentum and determination unmatched by the blunt mundane occurrences transpiring within it. Together, they loomed at the back of the class, catching the perfect view of Nate and Maddy and their daemons stretched at the front of their desks. Sylph was ever enraptured with the way Marlo—Maddy's daemon, a serval—was ever the enraptured with her. _We all owe Nate Jacobs a heartfelt apology and are excited and thrilled to have him back at East Highland._

In a hushed tone, Lexi canted her head and said, "Why would Jules try to help Nate?"

"I don't know."

Pax made a stifled noise of annoyance before he looked to Reid. "What about Celeste? Have you asked her about this?"

"No," he said, sitting like a statue with his stare fixated on Sylph. "And before you ask: no, we didn't ask Jules either."

On some strange tether, she knew exactly what her daemon was feeling because she was bolstered by the high-thrumming emotion too. As Sylph tilted her head and spotted them, she spoke something to Nate and he, much more subtly, angled his head to catch a look at them, almost cocky in the way that he examined them and his gaze bounced to the place Jules had taken as hers, she knew he took some pleasure in Jules' absence. Without real cause, she knew it, nonetheless. _Keep looking, you fucking mook,_ she thought, because she was Morgan fuckin' Freeman and this was the beginning of the third act.

This time, Lexi made the noise of sheer bewilderment. "Well, doesn't that seem like the first logical step? To ask them about this?"

With a specific grit in her tone and the bags under her eyes dragging her own gaze downward, she faced Lexi with a certain air that was a concoction of having not slept, pumping her bloodstream full of caffeine, and smoking a pack of cigarettes while talking to Reid on the walk to school because she knew the bus was not ready for what they had to fucking offer. "Honestly, Howard, this whole thing is beyond logic."

* * *

"Unless... Jules is in love _with_ Nate." It was lunch and they had approximately thirty minutes before the next bell and her lunch was going to be this pack of fucking cigarettes as she lit the first one with a match and placed it between her lips. 

Lexi furrowed her brows. "Why would Jules be in love with Nate?" As Rue walked over, the cloud from her first exhale from the cigarette caught in the shorter girl's path, egging a loose cough as she walked through it. 

"You should listen to me."

"Bennett, the cigarettes are killing me."

The smoke must've been enough to incite an actual reaction—or maybe she really just fucking wanted lunch—but Lexi and Pax had made a beeline for the bathroom door and Rue rushed to catch her. "Listen. Listen. Listen, the night of the carnival," she offered up, and Lexi slowed to a stop to hear this out, amusing her for what it was worth for the time being. "Jules said she wanted to go meet up with this guy she met online, okay?" Lexi nodded, engaged, not caught, but engaged and Rue was using her ability to ramble to hopefully get her invested in this as she was because she needed someone besides Reid and herself as caught up on how big this could genuinely be. "He's some fuckin' jock, he's from a conservative family, and they were talking and texting. They've been texting for weeks. And when I say texting, I don't just mean regular fuckin' texting. No, they were _sexting."_

"Like... nudes?"

Rue nodded once and took another drag from the cigarette. "Yeah—side note, very nice dick. Very clean room," she said. "But here's the thing, she never fucking saw his face."

At this point, Lexi had been reeled in enough to follow Rue, leaning against the wall as she paced between the stalls on either side of her. "Yeah, so Jules was catfished." The tone in her voice was loose, almost in the _isn't this obvious?_ sort of way. To combat this skepticism for the extreme stakes found but to goad the agreement that they were on the correct track together now, Rue took another drag and walked over, propping herself up with one arm as she slightly canted her body to better fix her and Lexi's gaze into one. 

"Now hear me out. So the night of the carnival, she made plans with this guy to meet up with him at the lake, okay?" Solemnly, Lexi nodded another with her brows pinched and her lips thinned into a line. Rue, attempting to reiterate this story perfectly, waves the cigarette along with her exaggerated hand motions. "I fucking go home. Next thing I know, she's fucking—" Rue knocked on the stall door beside them, and Lexi appeared entirely convinced, head adjusted and eyes trained on hers. "—knocking at my window. She's all emotional, she's got fucking tears in her eyes. I say, _Jules, what the fuck happened?_ She looks at me. She goes..." Rue tilted her head halfway toward the right, heart racing as she drew in her most convincing Jules impersonation. _"He didn't look like his pictures."_

Still amusing this but slightly less enthused, Lexi said, "Yeah, that's like, the definition of catfishing." If anything, her expression had taken on unbridled concern as she watched Rue pull another cigarette from the pack in her breast pocket, lighting it with a finesse that only came after lighting so many in succession. 

It was almost a dance the two of them had created within such a short time. Rue stepped around the corner, walking backward with Lexi followed seamlessly after, and their daemons trotting after them with their nails clicking on the tiles. "No, but do you know what his name was?"

As if coming to the catalyst of their back and forth, Lexi cracked a half-smile, crossed her arms and Pax slipped between them with his one good ear quirked high. "Wait, Nate Jacobs?" His tone was the perfect amount of _we gotcha_ that she knew Lexi was seething with that feeling, too.

"Tyler," said Reid, his muzzle displaying a perfectly cocky, doggy smile. 

"Like, Tyler Clarkson?" Lexi said, her tone slow enough that she'd be quickly corrected if need be.

After another drag, Rue took her cigarette from her lips, sliding it firmly between her index and middle finger before pulling a finger gun to confidently point at Lexi. "You're goddamned right,"

* * *

With fifteen minutes left to spare—and after Rue felt slightly bad for Lexi being hungry—they collected in the cafeteria with daemons and teenagers buzzing and talking here and there, but they had snagged an excellent table; one that perfectly caught view of the one Nate and Maddy were seated at. Reid hopped onto his hind legs and watched the daemons on the ground, critically cataloging everything that he would recite to her once they were alone. Lexi ate a mouthful of cold mac n' cheese—carefully handing noodle after noodle to Pax who sat with a lightly wagging tail beside her. 

"Maddy is seventeen, Tyler's twenty-two, and they fornicated."

After another decent bite, Lexi swallowed, utterly captured in this. "Statutory."

"Yeah. You saw it, I saw it. We all fucking saw it."

Reid made a noise and used a paw to click his nails against the table, capturing their attention. "Including Nate." Nodding then tilting her head to completely face Lexi and block Nate out of even her peripherals. "And what is a lighter offense than statutory?" Rue asked.

Something stronger than pregnant pause rang between them as silverware clipped plates and Lexi's mouth parted into an 'O' as her brows raised with an _aha_ moment striking her face. "Assault."

_**"Bingo!"** _

* * *

After three consecutive pots of coffee and another pack and a half of cigarettes and endless pacing of the length of her room with Reid an ever-changing shape beside her, flickering between animal after animal to somehow stay in step with how she was behaving, and goading her uncharacteristically as he became a raccoon to use his hands and pull spread out the photos and papers they had accumulated in hopes of connecting some dots. He echoed her statements and comments with agreeances or confirmation of facts, and that is what egged her to call Lexi at two-forty-five in the morning. 

"Don't you ever sleep?" Lexi had groaned into the phone as she came to, her voice uncharacteristically deep and gruff-like in the way she'd never heard it. Rue thought, perhaps, if she was buzzing out of her own bones, she'd recognize how much that voice spooled apart something in her stomach. In a good way, she figured.

With the phone pressed close to her ear, Reid sifted through the photos before her as she started. "Listen, why would Nate single out Jules in the first place? It's _obvious_ he was sexually attracted to her." She slipped the cigarette between her lips and lifted up, getting to her knees to look at the photos that were chosen. One was a mugshot of Tyler, another of a newspaper photo blown to printer-paper size of Nate. "And because Jules is predominantly het, okay, he wooed her with his, uh, fucking creepy jock magic shit." In spite of the subject matter, she tried not to sound hurt—or feel it, for that matter—how someone even as scuzzy and bastard-ish as Nate could so easily snag Jules' attention and keep it even after he'd been so fucking—theoretically, mind you—fucking miserable to her. "She's super fuckin' sensitive, she's very forgiving, and she's basically the most wonderful _fucking_ person on the planet..." After another drag and a breath after, as if seeking composure "...she fell for him. That's _why_ she fucking testified."

"You're a genius," chirped Reid, lifting up another photo of Nate except with Maddy this time. Then another of Maddy's injuries that she had retrieved by less than legal means. 

"You're a fucking genius." Rue, astounded with her and Reid's work, agreed then stood with such vibrancy. "Hey, Mom! We're fucking geniuses." She wheezed a satisfactory laugh after another drag of the cigarette, Reid turned into a lithe jackal and followed suit. "I'm not even tired. It's crazy. I'm not even fucking tired. I feel amazing."

Crickling through the phone again, Lexi spoke. "I'll be honest with you, Bennett... You're too close to this case."

The other line hung up without so much as another word and Rue could do nothing but blink at the disconnected conversation that had risen but she shook off the shock of being rejected and turned to face Reid, each was in the middle of a circle of photos, cups, files, and a lamp. They sat in dead silence before he got the urge to speak. 

"She sounded tired," he said. "We should call her in the morning. She'll wanna know in the morning,"

But there was a certain lilt in his voice that told her that he was tired... and, when she took stock of herself; she was too.

* * *

That detective-ridden week was enough to sap her and Reid of any intense cognitive or physical function, and with the excuse of the flu, their mom had agreed to allow them to stay home from school—which by all accounts, led to a two-day vacation that branched into the dawning weekend. All of it felt fucking miserable, however, and she hardly deemed it a weekend. 

Rue heard the flutter of wings before she saw Gia standing in the doorway with Adoni on her shoulder as a small owl, shadowed by the light in the hall. "Are you sure you got the flu?" she asked, stopping by the room after the second time "checking on her. "You sure, Rue?"

Blinking once, Rue hardly tilted her head to look at her before snapping, mustering up all the grit possible in her body to do so. "Gia, right now I just need you to leave me the fuck alone, all right?" Reid became a red wolf with his ears pinned back and his head low as he bit out a low growl to accentuate her meaning, but his growl dissipated into a distant whine as their siblings left, and it wrenched her heart in a manner that made her so desperately want to follow after and apologize for being a dick.

Apologies were sorely thought of, on the contrary, with the sheer weight and strain on her mere bladder, but _fuck,_ even the urge to apologize made her miss opiates because each one was an indicative release—for a brain on opiates was a little lazy and she was a little too stuck in her blanket mass that stunk of housing a girl that hadn't showered in days as well as a relatively smelly wolf, if she was on opiates she'd at least be forced to get such a release, but also... the last time she and Reid had left this room it wasn't exactly the best fucking experience. 

They both had been less than helpful in their mom's online dating endeavors, but they were even less help when Gia told them that he was coming to take their mom out for a date a week ago, only recently did he— _Rick_ and his daemon, a dull, bland golden retriever named, you fucking guessed it, Suze—started hanging out around the house like he lived here, sitting in their dad's chair at the table like he had any fucking right. On some level, perhaps they were both cunt-y but he was a prick and technically deserved it. Reid reacted to the buzz under the blanket before she registered it, and her heart skipped twice as she processed the name of the texter. She felt Reid's tail smack her as it wagged.

**From: Jules**

**hey.**

**From: Jules**

**sorry i kinda disappeared all week.**

  
**From: Jules**

**i got the flu.**

**To: Jules**

**Me too.**

**To: Jules**

**It's ok I was just worried about you.**

**From: Jules**

**sorry.**

**From: Jules**

**i think i'm gonna go visit a friend from my old school this weekend.**

The tail thumping against her suddenly ceased as she read the text aloud, and they slumped with the phone as it was shoved back under the covers. Rue was, again, so sullen and cramping... if she was truly bipolar, she much preferred being manic as opposed to depressed. At least within mania pill bottles talked to her and she asked Fez to maybe/sorta/kinda "scare" Nate with a gun, she snuck around Mouse and his asshole of a daemon again, she fucking peed like a normal fucking person. Because the worst thing about depression was that it blended their days into a mind-numbing, ceaseless loop, and she tried to remember all that she loved before it hit, of all the good times that happened, of kissing Jules, of the time before Halloween, but her brain had begun stomping them out like barely flickering fires, snuffing them all until she couldn't remember a time before the depression struck. On some level, it felt like life had always been so dragging and suffocating.

Rue halfway wanted to know whether Jules was going to have a good time with her friend at the same time, she so desperately wanted to know anything but because she knew it'd only make her feel worse to know that Jules didn't need her as much as it seemed _Rue_ needed her.

* * *

Two days later, Rue tried to go to the bathroom as her body declared its final plea for relief and justice for her four-day-long wrongdoing of it, and she collapsed halfway and had to be assisted to the fucking toilet of all things. She and Reid were in such an abysmal state that she even needed help being guided into the bathtub where her mom washed her hair and gently went at her shoulders with a washcloth as Reid was a sullen cheetah that was somehow smaller than Ossian, and lethargically took the tongue-bathing. All the while staring at the semi-bubbly water as her mom spoke softly, attempting to reassure her, to comfort her—Rue could only think of what a therapist of theirs had once said, how these states of theirs would wax and wane which gave their mother immense relief because it meant that even in the bad times, there would always be good times. But even as a kid, Rue knew it also gave her anxiety because it also meant that even in the good times, there would be bad times. 

It always confused her, she never knew what it meant.

"I think I need to go back on medication," Rue croaked, waving a hand stiffly through the water. But it did certainly sound calmer than the way she would describe it now.

"I know you're feeling low right now, baby." her mom said, calmly, softly, all the things that Rue felt she wasn't necessarily deserving of at this point. "But the fact that you didn't turn back means you're gettin' better. It does. It does." _It does, it does,_ Rue chanted to herself like a mantra. 

Granted, she didn't necessarily know what waxing and waning truly implied until now either—that these feelings were fixed and constant and they would never end for the rest of their lives.

As she was admitted to the ER that night, she thought so little of how she felt right _now_ ever truly changing. 

**Message from: Jules _[ unread ]_**

**_you have no idea how much i missed you._ **


	12. And Salt the Earth Behind You

One of the benefits of showing up at the hospital in the middle of the night with a kidney infection—Rue and Reid would discover—was that the first thing they did was give them something to bring down Rue's fever and subdue the agonizing pain she was in, and then the expression of said pain in the form of Reid's morose squirrel shape on her lap. She blinked at the nurse and the quail daemon perched on her shoulder. 

"Take this with a cup of water," she instructed, popping the pill into Rue's hand. The quail daemon chirped at Reid, a strange _wo-hoot_ that was a wordless query he didn't answer. 

"Is this Vicodin?" The nurse nodded, grabbing up a paper cup of water. "Five milligrams?" Exasperated, the nurse nodded. 

This moment was almost comical in its cruelty, staring down the pill in her hand with the same intensity of a cowboy in a western. She was vaguely aware of what Reid was thinking and how her stomach abdomen throbbed for relief, she weighed the odds, exhaled shakily. "I, um, I got my wisdom teeth taken out, like, a year ago, and they gave me Vicodin," Rue said, forehead beading with sweat but was under the impression that the weight of the pill was what made her so jaded. "It-It just wasn't-It wasn't good for me. It really," she offered the pill back to the nurse, jaw taut, regretting this and hating this but needing to because she had to at least say she tried. " _Really_ upsets my stomach."

"Okay," the nurse was saying, her daemon shaking his feathers. 

As she shifted uncomfortably on her side, Reid scurried over her hip as a stoat, sniffing warily at her twisted expression. "I think... I think I'll just go with Tylenol," she rasped. "Yeah, that'll be fine."

There was a throb behind her eyes, pulsating and ticking and causing her to gently grab at her stomach as though to keep the ache festering in one place as opposed to the rest of her body. "Are you sure? Kidney infections are extremely painful,"

 _No shit, Sherlock,_ she thought, brows knitted and her gaze cut at the woman. "'m sure," but then she thought carefully with Reid's beady eyes staring her down. Did it count as a relapse if it was warranted? That might as well be a hall pass, justification, reasoning beyond spluttering excuses because she needed this, then she said, "Unless... I can't quite remember what they put me on instead. It was, like... I don't know, it sounded like a candy name. It was like, uh, like Roxi..." Slowly rolling her hand in the air, feigning naivety to make it appear as though she didn't know a damned thing. Little nails bit into the skin of her other hand, she winced, barely smiled for the nurse. "Oh, I dunno, like Roxis..."

"Roxicet?"

On a dime she flipped, nodding. "Yeah, yeah that's it," she told her then the next with a bit too much knowledge that it was evident to all but her fretfully eager mind that she, in fact, should've known the name if she knew the following. "Roxicet, I'll go with that. 7.5 milligrams."

The nurse squinted, sighed. "Alright... Let me go check with the doctor."

Once she left, a small growl that was neither feline nor canid came from where two small furry hands smacked her hand once. "Rue, are you serious?"

"Kidney infections are painful," she said. "Oh, don't give me that look... you look like Mom."

When the doctor and his daemon entered the room, the look on his face was one akin to her Mom's but without all the history to make it brutal, overviewing her medical history, however, led him to keep her on Tylenol and assign her antibiotic given to those exposed to Anthrax—a kidney infection, she'd personally admit to, is entirely comparable if not worse than the aforementioned—and then one of the few antidepressants that didn't make her crazier, but even the bare minimum of mental stability didn't quite make her nor Reid happier, in fact, it didn't even do much beyond allowing her to shove through the fog in her mind a little less often because the fog failed to be as thick as it had been in the days before she was here; no, they were earnestly happy because their surroundings were nice.

They loved hospitals, unabashedly, and she often imagined living in one the rest of her life—she would, given the chance, she wouldn't leave the room and exposing gown because existing within a hospital is almost like existing within another plane of existence... but only one a little to the left of the one she abandoned when she walked through the doors. There were no responsibilities. A consistently opened cafeteria that didn't really matter because the staff ensured she was fed, hydrated, and that they slept. 

And, most importantly, if anything bad happened... a doctor was always nearby. 

Reid was seated on her shoulder, his whiskers twitching as they walked from the cafeteria with a cup of chipped ice. "Theoretically speaking," Reid whispered in their ear as the third doctor they'd seen that day passed them with a nod. "This is the best place to be in the event of a mass shooting."

She choked on a chip, swallowing her laugh. "Yet you say _I'm_ dark?" After a beat of contemplation. "Unless the gunman kills all the surgeons."

The point of this seemingly meaningless articulation of a murky three days is that she didn't have an ounce of anxiety flush her veins.

In the background, the television murmured on with a reality show to underline the mental image she crafted so dutifully under the cover of night when the wing she slept in was relatively quiet. Rue closed her eyes, sighing out over Reid's side, and imagined the little beeps of machinery to be the sounds of birds flying overhead, and the lukewarm air that ruffled her curls to be a warm, tropical breeze. If she thought long enough, their hospital bed began to feel like a poolside chair on a hot summer day in the Caribbean. 

That and Jules visited. That certainly made the stay... _better_.

* * *

At the foot of the bed as a tangle of limbs, Reid was a coyote with his hair all stuck-up and slightly darkened where Celeste was licking him attentively.

"Did all this happen because we left?" Jules whispered.

"No."

"You promise?"

"I promise," Rue said this while brushing back a strand of blonde/pink hair behind the other's ear, face to face yet there was something in Jules' stare that looked hundreds of miles away. Hundreds of miles away from this moment, from _Rue_. Her heart ached at the thought. At the back of her mind, niggling so unforgivingly, was the realization that what was dragging Jules' attention elsewhere was _her_. Maybe it made sense... her and all her jagged edges and crooked habits... Jules felt here but that meant so little if she was only going to leave, not that Rue blamed her. She'd have left herself so long ago if she could... tried to... failed and wound up in a bed just like this. She had to try and make her stay... if not only a little longer. "I've felt like this my whole life, Jules. Not all the time, but sometimes." spoken with a soft smile. "You make it better, though."

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

A moment of silence was her answer, and Rue felt her heart clamoring so loudly she swore it was going to be torn out through her throat. "For not telling you the truth."

Rue blinked. Reid made a noise that sounded a lot like a question, her gaze carefully found him looking at her, his brown brows furrowed, both were uneasy at the wrongness that flitted between the four of them.

* * *

They were right... something was different about Jules and Celeste. If only that made her feel justified in feeling like a maniac.

Rue was pitifully done up in a suit, she knew, she _felt_ gawky and bold and worryingly apparent to all those that'd look her way and she loathed it. Rue hated it, she wanted to be small, unexpecting, something lesser than the _more_ it felt like Jules was trying to make of her in this mirror—now more than ever she wanted to disperse. 

"Rue, you look fuckin' amazing," Celeste said. 

Eyes slipping over Reid and the little tie he had been given that'd fit his slender coyote neck and Celeste who watched with a strangely animated glee, Rue turned to the blonde cocking a smile at her. "Jules, I am deeply uncomfortable right now," she whined as her lapels were smoothed out. "Why're you making me look like a knockoff Prince?"

"Listen, you look hot," she said nonchalantly as though she didn't notice Rue's heart flutter, and slipped from where Rue stood at the mirror in Jules' room, to lift up her red hoodie with an expression of dread. "The fact that you usually dress like Seth Rogen—although you make it cute sometimes—like, it crushes my soul."

"I don't dress like Seth Rogen,"

Lifting up what Rue had indignantly stripped in the closet—much to Jules' distaste for only one of them were so open with being... bordering naked in front of the other—Jules emphasized the contrary of her words with, "When was the last time you didn't wear a hoodie and sweatpants?"

Rue didn't answer, feeling a little too exposed and a little... _something_ that she tried to shake away when Jules' cell buzzed for the tenth time since they started this unfortunate dressing journey. 

" _That_ is precisely why we're going to finish this."

* * *

Sprawled on the bed with Jules straddling her, Rue reveled in what felt like delicate intimacy reserved for them and them alone when the other leaned in to continue the elaborate execution of her makeup. She was uncertain where to place her hands, swimming in trepidation that the place that seemed proper was Jules' thighs... she swallowed hard, tested the waters when she flexed her hands cautiously, moved them lower, winced when the other leaned in and the contact was almost made. Rue pulled her hands back, rested them on her own chest with a half-smile. Even touch so minimal felt potentially disastrous where Jules was concerned... the memory of their first kiss was so fervidly etched into her mind, the slimy feeling that festered in her gut—such a leap in physical touch was unasked for, and Jules was so kind and so wonderful that Rue knew Jules wouldn't utter a word if she were to breach a comfort zone, and worried more that a _no_ wouldn't even be considered, she certainly didn't know how to say no when it mattered... not that it'd have mattered... her words always mattered so little when they maybe/might've/should've. 

Rue refused to do that to Jules, _wouldn't_. 

If she were to touch her, she'd ask, or warn... give a moment or two to consider and reject. Anything to assure that there was more than one option and it wasn't _give in_ or let _me push until you do._

"It was, like, the most amazing weekend ever. I legit cannot stop thinking about it, you know. It was, like, the first time..." Jules sniffed, reaching out a hand to push aside Rue's hair. "...I ever felt like I had a family, that wasn't my dad or like, you. And, oh, my God. Rue... you would die for Anna."

"Who's Anna?" The cell beeped as she asked.

Instead of answer, Jules laughed, shaking her head. "She's next level," Celeste drawled as Reid sat hopelessly above her, she, pawing gently at his tie, he, twitching once she continued talking. "Her daemon, Quentin, he's a cheetah, yuh' know, he's fucking wicked... God, you'd like him, he knows how to get all the knotty bits in your fur that you can't reach."

Reid's ears pinned back, Rue's heart slammed. If that was any indication... "Did you guys, like, hook up or something?"

"Basically," she said. "If I'm honest it was crazy, like, went to the club, and that energy it, like, matched hers, and then I was feelin' it—or her." Rue's heart dropped straight into her entrails when saw the giddy way these events were retold in. Not once did she remember a moment between them being retold so... fondly. It was always fleeting, forgettable... or too memorable and brutal. Years from now, Rue would equate their memorable moments going unspoken the same way nightmares are rarely uttered. "And she just, like, grabbed me and sort of like, pushed me down, and like, kissed me. And... she fuckin' bit me."

"She bit you?!" Reid squeaked, pulled downward by the tie. "Did he... did _he_ bite you?"

Rue didn't get to hear the answer to that before Jules revealed the bite mark on her neck. Not a hickey. A _bite mark_ , her stomach churned, fright, horror, _why would you let her?_

Oh. "Oh," she said. "Did you like it...?"

"Kinda," Jules tapped her fingers on Rue's stomach. "Why? Do you? Ya' know, like that sort of thing?"

"I dunno," because she didn't, not entirely. One would have to be cognizant enough to know if the actual act of receiving such a bite was enjoyable.

"Wanna find out?" was teased.

"I dunno," she laughed. "Maybe."

If there was anything to the faded sensations of Jules' teeth against her flesh, it was the realization that Rue wanted nothing so... rough. Not with Jules. Rough felt wrong with her, misplaced. Or perhaps she felt misplaced with something so rough. Perhaps it was both.

This realization would come to matter soon enough and not for the reason one would think.

* * *

Winter formal was an event that would come to serve as the mark that changed lives and paved new paths, as well as act as the monument to which others remembered if they were to need an indicator they were thinking about what happened _before_. 

Winter formal will forever pose as the catalyst for Rue and Reid, marking the day that they were left to wander home sodden, splintered, lost.

But the specifics of the events that left so many lives changed and paths created aren't important—they will be, not yet.

What's important, however, is one thing:

_Jules is gone._

_Jules is gone,_ yes, and that was the first domino in the string of events that will come to transpire but please note this—as it is equally as important but significantly less notable—Jules set fire to the town when she left but she forgot to salt the earth behind her and what rose in the wake was, coincidentally, _several_ downfalls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M NOT DEAD AND THIS CHAPTER WOULDN'T END FOR NOTHING!!
> 
> I took a bit of a hiatus because the feel for this story just wasn't there but after a few rewatches, I'm back to give you all emotional turmoil with this penultimate episode... of sorts! Prepare to delve into my own rejection of certain scenes in this episode and the exploration of my headcanons.


	13. Psychotropic, genesis

Rue fell from sobriety the same way a star falls: fast, hot, savagely. 

With a bleary blink, she stared at the mirror in the bathroom, stared at the pupil-blown stranger, fancying that she could see the residue of white powder caught around her nostril. She blocked out the unreliable way Reid recoiled as she sniffed hard, sinuses burning and eyes watering. Something hummed in her pocket... she fumbled it out, half-hoping it was a familiar name with a familiar _I'm coming back_ text that stamped their prior hospital visit. Instead, it was none of what she thought and she whined/growled/whimpered under the weight of the rush that sent her mind soaring, veins flushed with the anger that bubbled in the wake of being _alone_. 

Pathetically, she clung to that anger because it was familiar, bared her teeth against it, and watched as Reid flickered through an index of forms that matched her state, each baring fangs, and a tucked tail. She held onto that provocative rage because she knew it, expected it—and it was kinder than the brutality in feeling right, the realization of being _left_ , not chosen. 

**From: Lexi**

**Where'd you n' Jules go? We were _this_ close to forming a search party on ur guys' behalf. **

**From: Lexi**

**You okay? I tried waiting on u both but I'm going home. Call me so I know ur not dead or like... committing a felony somewhere, ok?**

"Oh no," she whispered, moving from the bathroom on wobbly legs that forgot how to be legs, using the wall as support until she fell through her bedroom door with a _thud!_ that sounded loud enough to rock the town. Not necessarily angry, nor lost, just muddled and knotty in all the wrong places. She let her head fall once her back hit the bed, muscles wincing. "There I go."

"Oh," Reid whined, laying on the floor. "We're gone..."

 _"Okay, what am I gonna tell Gia, though, you know, like," Rue couldn't bear the thought of her sister thinking, even for a moment, that she was dead, that she wasn't worth choosing, that **she** had **left** her. But Jules and Celeste were already hopping onto the train, gleefully laughing, smiling... and she felt sodden, her chest wound so tight. "She's gonna wake up _ _in the fucking morning. She's gonna think I'm missing."_

_"We're good, 'cmon," Jules tugged on her hand, attempting to get into stepping up, to leave. Instead, Rue stayed stagnant, a teary-eyed sentry with Reid as a creature that looked beaten, neither a whipped dog or a wounded cub, just a being built from hurt and unheard cries. This time, Jules hesitated—shook it away when her eyes glistened, tearful and fragile. "Rue?"_

Wheezing, her breaths shaky, she rolled onto her stomach, but her back snapped against the floor when she crashed into it instead. Cell buzzing... or ringing... or that was her lungs.

_"I can't..." It was a whimper that sounded so stupid and small and almost chewed up by the sound of the train readying itself, people chattering beyond the doorway, but her throat was closing up. Brittle words were all she had._

_Suddenly, the train was hissing and the end of Jules and Rue was near approaching. She lifted Rue's hand, pulling it close to press a cheek to and, through a broken sob, said, "Please... I love you."_

_**Then stay,** Rue thought. _

_They didn't._

Rue found herself gripping grass, humming at the dark sky as a dog walked past that might've been familiar. "Where's he going?" she asked Reid, finding him as a soggy caracal with a hare's tail. "Why're you always so wrong?'

He said nothing. 

_"Why're you so wrong?" Her mom practically hissed it as she and Reid daemon slipped from the house with a bang of the door and the muffled hum of Gia's voice._

_Reid carefully pressed his head against her cheek in the form of a stoat, he whispered, "We're not wrong," he told her. "Nothing's wrong with us..."_

"Why're you out here?"

Rue tilted her eyes up, blinking up at Cassie. "We're wrong," she admitted truthfully, hiccuped, sniffed and sat up from where she was laying on her back, sprawled out like she was splayed roadkill. She gagged upon sitting upright. "Why're you here?"

"Why're they in our house?" Reid squeaked... somewhere.

A blur of white slipped by then bobbed back into view with Reid dangling harvest mouse-formed in Kalon's jaws. "You're in _our_ yard," he corrected with a muffled undertone and looked up at the blonde who stood over them. "Don't think you can carry her so easily."

"This is bullshit," Cassie said with no real bite in her tone, more sympathetic than anything and more so after Rue's drawled _so that's how you found us, huh?_ that fell out with a dry heave. "Are you gonna throw up if I try to help you? I'd feel bad leavin' you out here like this,"

Rue waved a hand nonchalantly, hiccuping once, and forced out a half-grin that hurt her cheeks. "S'alright really," she said. "You should leave us here, everyone leaves us here, it's soft... grassy, smells somewhat of Four Loko's laced-vomit."

"Everyone leaves you in our yard specifically? Kinda weird, I'd assume they'd leave you... I dunno, like, in a diner. Or an empty dance studio."

In response, Rue grieved a sigh and fell onto her back and rolled to her side, blowing out a sad breath that flitted through the blades of grass. Then she contemplated all the dogs that walked through here, all the bugs and disgusting bacteria and multiple transmittable diseases passed through raccoon and rabbit shit, and surged upright, gasping and spitting. Two hands gently pressed against her shoulder blades, keeping her steady.

"On the count of three, you're gonna stand up, okay?"

"Might as well, I don't got anywhere else to—ah!" Rue squeaked, hauled upright to lean against Cassie in a manner that felt... stable for the other girl being smaller—if Rue knew better at the moment, she would say it was almost practiced, as though she hadn't been the only crooked heap of a human that had to be helped. "Oh, oops, look at you... you're so small, I should be the one carrying you... theoretically."

"Just... shush, _please_?" Cassie sounded exasperated as she shouldered open the door, nearly losing her grip on Rue's shirt and side. "Kal, go get Lexi, ah— _hurry_." After the sound of light paws going up the steps struck, she said. "I thought you were sober..."

"I was, excellently so but you see, I'm impulsive and erratic and my emotions tend to dictate my behavior more than my brain—I also don't have self-preservation instincts and I'm chronically reckless, my guidance counselor once—"

"What the fuck, Rue?" she heard Lexi say— _heard_ because at this time, Cassie lost her withstanding grip, and, once Lexi hit the bottom step, Rue smacked the ground with a yelp. 

It was only expected that nausea would strike as she stared hazily at the mouse daemon being dropped upon her chest by white jaws, clawing up her throat was acrid bile that soured her teeth and left her stomach boiling. It was an uncontrollable and unanticipated reflex as she held Reid close to keep him from tumbling off her as she lurched sideways, mind throbbing, and vomited, no warning. Only a retch after the fact.

Onto Lexi's socks.

There came a startled noise and a gag from above when Cassie stretched awkwardly to brush back Rue's hair before it fell unfortunately into the sad puddle of puke that was the culmination of her. "She's fucked up," Lexi said, and Rue tried to shrink... become smaller than she felt in the face of such... not crudeness... but not kindness, or maybe it was, she wondered why they were doing this. Cassie carefully tied back her hair, she winced. "God, okay, help me get her upstairs."

"This is fucked of me—"

"—of us," Reid corrected, now unceremoniously being carried by Kal once more as Paxton sniffed strangely at him. 

"This is fucked of us," she said. "I'm sorry for being fucked."

"Not sorry enough to _not_ do this," said Lexi. 

The next thing she remembered was being dragged into a bed.

Once, she woke to the sound of others speaking above her.

Once, she woke to someone pulling at the blazer she wore, she swatted the hands away even though they won, leaving her to curl hopelessly against a pillow in a tank top.

Once, she fell asleep and didn't wake again, or she thought she hadn't—presumed the dreams were simply too vivid, hummed bitterly.

_"Why do they always leave?"_

_"Who always leaves?"_

_"I just want to be good... why can't I be good? I'll be good,"_

_"What the hell are you talking about?"_

_"I'm so wrong, I've always been so wrong."_

_"Christ, Rue..."_

_"That's why they leave."_


End file.
